


Voltron WIP dump

by brigantines



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 13:49:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14812550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigantines/pseuds/brigantines
Summary: Dumping ground for various Voltron WIPs, in hopes that it will pressure me to work on some of them.  Some of them literally stop mid-sentence, some may be legitimately abandoned, so fair warning.





	1. Spacecats (the Blade of Marmora AU)

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings to be added.

“I’m keeping him,” Keith announces, the line of his pert black ears mulish, before Kolivan can even say anything.

Kolivan looks askance at the furless alien bleeding all over his floor and all over his newest recruit, back from what should have been a simple recon mission on one of the imperial prison ships. Keith was supposed to have been the pilot, staying safely aboard the Blade shuttle while Antok and Regris extracted data from the prison ship’s computer, but the way the pair of them studiously avoid Kolivan’s gaze tells him everything he needs to know about what happened on the mission. 

The alien itself is a ragged mess, dressed in a prison uniform and either unconscious or dead, draped limply over Keith’s shoulder like a sort of muscley, half-inflated rug. All Kolivan can see of its face is a messy mop of black hair, much like Keith’s own, and a startling white forelock trailing limply down the front of Keith’s chest armor. It is tall enough that its feet drag on the ground, taller than Keith, and built heavier, although nowhere near the bulk of most Galra. Kolivan doesn’t know how Keith managed to drag it all the way through a Galra cruiser in so awkward a position, holding the alien’s crossed arms over his chest, but clearly he had, in violation of his orders to remain at his post, and now he stares at Kolivan with that familiar stubborn twist to his mouth that Kolivan remembers from not so long ago battles about bathtime and naps. His slender tail lashes incessantly, not at all contrite about defying his pack leader. 

This is why the order doesn’t accept potentials who are barely out of kittenhood, Kolivan reminds himself wearily as he turns his gaze on Regris, bringing the force of his authority to bear on someone who actually respects it. Regris, gratifyingly, twitches. 

“We took our eyes off him for just a second,” he mutters guiltily. “He said he smelled something strange.”

“He was going to _die,_ ” Keith insists, lifting his chin. “The guards were beating him. What was I supposed to do?”

Kolivan is sure he’s already covered the answer to that in many of his lectures about mission protocol, and pinches the bridge of his nose. Maker only knew what sort of diseases or parasites the creature had, or whether it was even domesticated, or housebroken. The prison guards might have been beating it because it had fought back, and was vicious. 

“And besides,” Keith continues defiantly, “it’s my nameday, isn’t it?”

“Your nameday is not an excuse to shirk your duties,” Kolivan says sternly after only the slightest pause, ignoring the way his stomach drops in primal, instinctive fear. It couldn’t be Keith’s nameday already. He’d only just had one, the entire base now recognizing it as an unofficial holiday despite the best efforts of military discipline. It was impossible that an entire year should have passed already, and also someone would have mentioned something to him. Probably. “Nor is it an excuse to ignore the orders of your commanding officers. I sent you as part of a team, tasked with collecting vital reconnaissance information. Was that accomplished?”

Antok silently shows him a tiny data carrier. 

“Keith disabled a number of the guards who were concentrated on the prisoner’s location and not properly manning their posts,” Regris admits. “We were able to get the data easily while the other prisoners rioted. Many of them managed to escape, as well, and there was no pursuit as we left. Our hand will not be detected in this.”

Oh. Kolivan finds himself deflating a little. 

Keith eyeballs him. “You didn’t forget the date, did you, Leader?”

“Of course not.” Kolivan allows a hint of temper into his tone, a warning for clever kittens to leave well enough alone. “Of course I would not forget.” He can almost smell Regris and Antok’s respect for him draining away.

“You forgot last year, Thace told me so.”

Thace is a traitor to the pack and thoroughly enslaved by the tiny whims of a child. Kolivan laces his ears back, cranky. “Do you plan to spend your nameday doing punishment drills?”

“No, Leader.” Keith ducks his head shyly, always happy to be submissive after successfully testing Kolivan’s patience. “Then I can keep him? Really?” 

As if Kolivan could do anything else now but allow it. “I haven’t yet decided,” he growls, which is as good as concession from the way Keith’s ears perk up hopefully. Kolivan looks at Regris instead, pretending that he still has some semblance of authority. “Help Keith take it to Ulaz for a medical examination, and tell him it must be quarantined if it has parasites or diseases of any sort. And Keith, it is not sleeping in your bed, and you will be responsible for making a shelter for it, and feeding and watering it, and cleaning up after it. If you think you can’t handle the responsibility--”

Only a few years ago (alright, perhaps a decade ago), Keith would have come running to him after such a concession, purring wildly and rubbing his cheeks against Kolivan’s. For a second he is even expecting it, bracing himself, but Keith only looks delighted, and he tries to snap to attention under the deadweight of the unconscious alien. “Of course I can, Leader.”

It is very nearly an adult’s answer, Kolivan thinks wistfully, although of course Keith is nowhere near his age of majority yet. His hybrid body has not shown the same signs of aging as a true Galra, but he is much taller now, and slender as the kitten fat melts off his bones. He’d come to them a miniature thing, big-eyed, with unkempt hair that begged to be groomed and flailing, grabby little fists with undeveloped claws, smaller than even the sickliest Galra kitten. He’d been a quiet broody child, and then an exuberant one as he settled into his place in the pack and realized how much power he could wield over a group of adults who ought to have known better, and now he’s gone back to being quiet and broody, subtly resisting the authority of his superior officers in that way juveniles could not seem to help. 

Still, he trains with a dedication that Kolivan despairingly wishes could be shared amongst some of his seniors, though still uninitiated himself, and when he is not training he is flying, as no punishment or orders could keep him out of the pilot seat of any craft he could find. He is a gifted pilot, far beyond the standards of the Blades. Once upon a time, before the restrictive edicts against halfbreed bloodlines, he would have been a star of the Imperial navy, honored and respected, with prospects of wealth and offers of excellent breeding matches even before his first rut. 

On that thought. “Keith, tell Ulaz to look into having it neutered--”

But Keith is already gone down the hallway, his scent heady with excitement, Regris trailing after him carrying the creature’s legs, and Kolivan exhales loudly and tells himself that he is an old paranoid. The alien is half-dead already, perhaps it will do them all the favor of completing the process. 

Antok, remaining, shifts his weight meaningfully. 

“It is his nameday today, isn’t it.”

Antok’s mask dips, nodding.

“And clearly marked on the schedules.”

Another nod.

“And I suppose I will have to let him keep that thing, if it survives.”

A tail twitch, which could mean anything from ‘yes’ to ‘I can’t answer that question without compromising myself.’

“What did you get him, then?” Kolivan asks crossly, even though he already knows the answer. Antok had chosen Keith for his pilot on the mission, and also could have locked the shuttle doors to force Keith to stay put. He had given the boy an opportunity to make a violent spectacle of himself, which Keith enjoys almost as much as flying. 

Antok bows low to him, which is just as infuriating, and speaks at last, his voice a rusty rumble. “There is still time to give him a ship of his own, rather than a pet. It is probably the only thing that would distract him sufficiently.”

Kolivan shudders instinctively at the thought. “We will take our chances with the pet. Perhaps it will do all of us a favor, and die before he becomes too attached.”

****

“It is in no danger of dying,” Ulaz assures him later, silently dashing Kolivan’s hopes. The surgeon speaks quietly so as not to disturb Keith, who has apparently exhausted himself like a kitten by spending his entire nameday in the lab assisting with all the scans and procedures, even going so far as to methodically sponge the grime from the alien’s scar marked hide, and is now sleeping with his head buried in his arms on the edge of the creature’s bed, close to its torso. It smells much better now that it is clean, Kolivan allows grudgingly, and the filthy prison rags cut from its body and sent to be incinerated. White bandages swathe its injuries, matching the shock of white hair at its forelock. 

“But?” Kolivan asks, because Ulaz

 

 

 

The alien does not die. Keith spends his entire nameday in the medical labs with his new project, cleaning it, tending its injuries, assisting the assistants with running scans and hissing when anyone suggests removing the creature to quarantine. When he had been younger, before he was allowed to participate in combat training, Keith had spent countless hours in the labs under Ulaz’s watchful eye, 

 

 

 

 

He cuts the alien out of his tattered rags, grimacing at the smell and the feel of the stiff, dried blood soaked into the fabric. The assistants dispose of the disgusting mess while Keith wipes the poor thing down with soft, damp cloths, removing the worst of the blood and the sweat and the grime while avoiding the injuries that are still sluggishly bleeding, and the deep mottled bruising. The alien’s skin is crisscrossed with enough scars to impress a Galra veteran, and pale, showing all of its damage. Keith discovers a very fine layer of fur close to the skin, dark like the creature’s hair, and also sees where it has been scraped clean by the indifferent handling of the guards. There are surgical scars, too, especially clustering around the arm, which he had hoped Kolivan would not notice. The arm stinks like old, hot oil, and blood, and quintessence. It also smells vaguely and threateningly like the business end of a laser rifle. 

“Ulaz needs to look at this when he returns,” one of the assistants mutters, and then snaps at him, as if he were still a kitten needing to be told the obvious. “Don’t touch the arm, it could be dangerous.” Keith pins his ears and continues cleaning the alien’s strange, blunt face; no fangs, no facial fur, and such small, stunted pale ears. Keith runs a clawtip over them curiously. He wishes the assistants would finish the battery of tests ordered by Kolivan and leave them alone, so he could gawk without an audience.

If Keith had to pick a species out of the races familiar to him, he would suppose the alien resembled an Altean, save for its lack of color markings and the fact that there were no more Alteans. 

 

 

Ulaz is on his way back to the base, so Kolivan trusts he’ll be able to take charge of the situation. 

 

 

When Keith had been younger, before he was allowed to participate in combat training, he had spent countless hours in the labs with Ulaz, shadowing him and handing him tools, or napping in the corner of his office, drowsing as he listened to Ulaz read out results in his calm, quiet voice. He is too impatient to dedicate himself to medicine, as Kolivan had half-hoped when Ulaz’s long dormant parental instincts reared their ugly heads and had him whisking the kitten off for hours on end, even growling at Kolivan like a queen brooding over her helpless, vulnerable infant, which Keith very much was not. But the long hours spent in the medical bay had given Keith a base competency with its equipment, enough so that Ulaz felt comfortable leaving the still unconscious alien in his hands while he opens a shortwave channel to Kolivan.

“ _Are you insane_ ,” are the first words out of his mouth, undermining any veneer of the cool and collected surgeon that Kolivan seems to remember recruiting to the order and replacing it, again, with broody parent. “Do you know what is lying on the table in my laboratory right now?” 

“A stray.” Kolivan refuses to let his ears flatten under the onslaught. Ulaz is not actually Keith’s dam or his sire, a fact for which Kolivan has to be grateful, as he can only imagine the reactions would be even worse. “He got it off a prison ship. Is it injured beyond repair?” he asks hopefully. “Should we put it out the airlock and tell him we sent it on to a nice colony of its own kind to live out its life?”

Ulaz’s jaws click shut. “No,” he says, now sounding conflicted. “He is not injured beyond repair. He has remarkable healing capabilities thanks to his modifications.” He fixes Kolivan with an intense look, more worried now than angry. “Leader, that alien is the arena Champion. He is of the same race as Keith’s father, and a Druid experiment. I performed surgeries on him with my own hands when I was stationed aboard the flagship.”

Even the remote parts of the universe have seen the broadcasts of the gladiator arena and heard the rumors of its famous Champion, a tiny underdog alien that had shocked everyone with its tenacity and ferocity. They called it a washout, a failed experiment from the Druids’ discard pile, but one could never be sure. The Druids did cruel and sadistic things to their victims that Kolivan could not bring himself to believe were arbitrary. Quintessence was expensive and precious, even with the Empire’s vast hoard of it. He found it hard to believe that such a resource would be wasted on a mere gladiator thrown to the slave pits to die.

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	2. illegal guinea pig

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance is convinced the new kid in his class is an alien.

The problem with all the movies depicting plucky kids discovering aliens or psychic child soldiers or super-advanced adorable robots or whatever and then bringing them home and hiding them in their rooms, Lance thinks despairingly, is how _easy_ they all make it look. Sneak in through a window. Duck past oblivious parents. Nobody looks the wrong way, and nobody trips over anything, and anyone who discovers the secret ends up being recruited as an ally.

“What the fuck,” whispers Lance’s roommate, who is named Jason or Justin or something like that, Lance can’t ever remember, because he’s _never fucking there,_ except of course he would reappear the one single time Lance had been counting on the room to be empty.

Jason is staring down at the obscenely beautiful man sleeping in Lance’s bed. Lance can’t really blame him, since it’s a gorgeous view of a sheet-covered but clearly naked Takashi Shirogane, heartthrob ace pilot and recently thought to be deceased, star of roughly a million of Lance’s schoolboy and hot instructor fantasies. Part of Lance wants to preen a little bit, because _yeah,_ that’s Takashi Shirogana, live and in the flesh, in Lance’s bed, but the other part of him wants to fluff up like an angry cat and hiss, because Shiro is not for the likes of Justin to stare at, not after Lance went to all the trouble of rescuing him from dissection and imprisonment at the surprisingly shitty hands of the Garrison and sneaking him back into his room to… stay. Heal. Something. Lance hadn’t really gotten much farther past that in terms of planning. 

He springs up from his bedside vigil like a rocket, sliding his arm around Jackson’s shoulders. “Buddy!” he sing-songs in a carefully controlled panic. “Buddy, old pal. Long time no see? I know what this looks like, and I can promise you--”

“Why is there a naked dude in your bed?”

Now that’s just insulting. Lance plasters a smile on his face, reminding himself to be grateful for the fact that Juddson apparently doesn’t recognize the guy that Lance used to have posters of taped all over the walls of this same room. “Uh, why are there naked dudes in anyone’s bed? I’ll let you guess. Also, why are you here? Do you even still live here? I haven’t seen you in like, six months.” 

Which is definitely grounds for someone not living in a place anymore in Lance’s opinion. He does not want Jimson or Joson living here again, even without the addition of a naked Takashi Shirogane that he is hiding from the Garrison in his dorm room like an illegal guinea pig. “I’ve been having sex on your bed,” he adds hopefully. “Exclusively on your bed. I call it the sex bed, and no one should ever want to sleep on it ever again.” 

Jensen or Jessop doesn’t respond, still staring at Lance’s occupied, non-sex bed. At Shiro’s handsome, still face, as regal and composed as a statue. Lance relents and lets himself stare a little bit, too. Staring at Shiro doesn’t get old. Hunk had even busted out an ancient set of calipers to measure the angle of Shiro’s jawline or something, declaring that it was structurally impossible for a real person to be that pretty. 

“Is that guy wearing a handcuff?” Jimmy or Joel asks.

Shiro is absolutely wearing a handcuff, since Hunk had decided it would take more time to try and find the key or pick the lock than to just saw through the metal railing the handcuff had been locked around. Lance doesn’t know what anyone thought handcuffing a _cyborg arm_ to the railing of a gurney bed was going to do anything, but the creepy dudes in hazmat suits had seemed very invested in showing off their bondage fetishes, strapping down and restraining their captive. The memory makes Lance want to kick someone. “Ye-es. Yes. Absolutely. We’re into that, handcuffs and blindfolds and shit. Don’t tell my mom. Also, you should probably go now and also forever.”

“Dude.” Jack or Jacob gives him a frankly insulting impressed look even as he lets Lance steer him towards the door. “He’s way out of your league. How drunk did he get to pass out in your bed?”

“Super, super drunk,” Lance snaps, and stuffs a wad of credits in Jaden or Jonquil’s pocket for his silence even as Lance boots him out into the hallway and shuts the door in his face. Jesus Christ.

“I’m sorry about that,” he whispers to Shiro as he slinks back to his chair at the side of the bunk bed. “Roommate who doesn’t actually live here. You know how it is.” 

Fortunately or unfortunately, Shiro hasn’t stirred at the commotion. Shiro hasn’t stirred in the forty-eight hours he’s been here, wrapped in Lance’s shitty threadbare sheets, pale and breathing shallowly. Pidge thinks Shiro is still getting over the sedatives he’d been pumped full of since his capture, which, what the fuck, you don’t _capture_ your long lost star pilot after he crash lands an alien ship into the desert, you _rescue_ him, but Pidge is a crazy online forum conspiracy theorist person and a terrifyingly competent hacker, not a doctor, and Lance is starting to get concerned about the possible need for a catheter and IV drip.

He bites his lip and leans forward, sweeping his fingers along Shiro’s pulse points to count his heartbeat and checking his other injuries. The Garrison doctors had started working on Shiro’s wounds from the crash by the time Lance and Hunk and Pidge had managed to sneak into the weird pop-up clean room in the middle of the desert, dressed in stolen hazmat suits. Lance had wanted to charge right in. Pidge had wanted to blow something up as a diversion. Hunk had suggested the much more boring idea of remote controlling several of the transports, hastily wheeling Shiro aboard one and then driving half a dozen identical vehicles out into the desert to throw off their pursuers. 

He’d seen it in a movie once, he’d said. It was almost anticlimactic, watching the Garrison staff peel out after them in a threatening wave and then scatter off into a dozen random directions, chasing decoys that would eventually just stop running once they got too far away from the controller signal. The plan had been to dump their transport and get Shiro aboard another vehicle somewhere, but at that point it seemed silly to not just drive all the way back to base and park in the giant hangar full of other transports. Pidge knew all the gate codes because he’d been sneaking out every night to listen for alien broadcasts on the roof or whatever, and Hunk knew how to blank out the vehicle IDs. He was sure, and he was correct, that nobody had properly signed out their vehicles when they’d all gone tearing out into the desert in response to a crashing alien ship.

Steering around an unconscious man in a paper hospital gown slumped over in a wheelchair would’ve raised some eyebrows, even at the Garrison dorms, but Pidge was already on it. He’d gotten detention so many times nobody batted an eye at him grabbing one of the big laundry carts and wheeling it all the way out to the hangar, and they’d folded up the wheelchair and put down some sheets and blankets carefully arranged Shiro aboard like a small child ferrying a large stuffed animal in their little wagon, arms and legs dangling over the sides. Another couple sheets thrown on top and no one had even glanced their way as they carefully navigated back to Lance’s room. It had opened Lance’s eyes to the terrifying reality of what you could really sneak into a dorm.

Anyway, Shiro still has stitches and bandages and even a cast from the Garrison whitecoats, and Lance looks them over dutifully, despite not knowing what the hell he’d do if he actually did find something wrong. Sneaking Shiro into town to see a non-Garrison doctor is no go right now. The whole base is still on high alert, even though the staff are trying to pass it off like business as usual for the students, citing sanctimonious concerns about a meteor impact and “reckless looters” making off with irradiated pieces of meteor, as if anyone would believe that horseshit coming out of the infamous desert military base where rumors of alien activity have been going on for the last two hundred years. There’s a group of truth-at-all-costs protesters rallied at the chain link gates right now, waving signs about UFOs and demanding the government come clean about their secret paranormal experiments, while an honest to god crashed alien ship is smoking out in the desert not five miles away. Lance is pretty sure Pidge knows some of them, and they might even be willing to help with Shiro, but Lance can’t bring himself to trust people that voluntarily spend several hours a day out in the desert sun wearing eight foot tall alien mascot suits and hats that play TV show theme music.

Costumes aside, the list of people that Lance is willing to trust with Shiro’ safety is really, really thin right now, after watching Garrison staff, people that probably knew Shiro personally or had assisted with the Kerberos launch, cuff him and treat him like a prisoner, sedating him when he’d tried to get them to listen. Shiro hadn’t tried to fight them. He’d been bleeding and burned, clearly upset and exhausted beyond endurance, and they’d kept guns trained on him the whole time like he was some kind of rabid animal. The doctors were even worse. They’d taken samples while Shiro was unconscious, blood and skin and hair and god knew what else, and they’d cut Shiro out of his weird alien bodysuit and pulled it off him to ogle him like a piece of meat on the table, only laying out a thin little towel over Shiro’s privates for modesty while literally dozens of people walked in and out of the room, poking and prodding and staring and _touching,_ so much unnecessary touching, and they’d talked about trying to saw off his cyborg arm. 

“You don’t have to worry about that anymore,” Lance says determinedly to Shiro’s sleeping face, tugging the sheets and blankets up higher on his beautiful, beautiful chest. _Lance_ hadn’t given into any nasty voyeur temptations the entire time, even when he had to give Shiro sponge baths. He’d even had Hunk stand guard, peeking through the gaps in his fingers to keep Lance honest. Carefully running a warm, damp washcloth over his idol’s kneecaps and armpits, the knobs of his surprisingly fine-boned ankles and the dip of his collarbone had become a confused, half religious half erotic experience, and Lance is honest enough to admit that he did all of it with a very distracting semi in his pants, but by god, he did not touch anything he shouldn’t have touched, and he spent way more time washing Shiro’s hair than he did anything else. He even did Shiro’s nails and whipped frantically through his personal cache of moisturizers and beauty masks to try and find something for Shiro’s poor, space-chapped skin until Pidge walked in one day to find Shiro with full facemask and soothing cucumber slices on his eyes and his hair full of leave-in conditioner, and started yelling at Lance about consent and exploitation as if Pidge hadn’t stolen Shiro’s medical chart like the vicious little information hoarder he was.

“He could be allergic!” Pidge had screeched in horror, flapping his hands at both of them. “He’s got stitches!”

“I didn’t moisturize his stitches!” Lance had snapped back, sick to death of Pidge’s weird shit with Shiro and the Kerberos mission, acting like he was the only person in the world who cared about what had happened to them. He and Pidge bickered until the timer went off for Lance to wash off Shiro’s mask, which Pidge insisted on helping with, and then they continued to bicker when Pidge found out Lance had managed to find a pair of lotion socks on the base for Shiro.

Pidge is just mad that Lance’s room is the only one big enough to feasibly hide an entire adult human in, forcing Pidge to actually have to leave his own lair and be social in order to get near Shiro. Pidge had managed to swing a single, but Lance is absolutely positive that Pidge’s room had started life as a broom closet. There’s barely room to shut the door with someone actually standing inside. Also Pidge lives in a literal rodent nest of wires and networked monitors and cooling fans and other illegal equipment that he passes off as an R&D project when anyone asks, which, just, no. Shiro deserves the best they can give him, and the best they can give him is Lance’s room, with Lance’s bed, while Lance not-quite guiltily skips classes and texts Hunk over his school issued datapad using incredibly uncool coded language about the Eagle’s Nest and checks every five minutes or so to make sure that Shiro is still breathing.

Shiro is still breathing. His chest rises and falls regularly, his features calm and reposed rather than soft. He looks horribly, achingly different from the handsome, beaming pilot featured in Lance’s precious recruitment posters, the ones he’d had to take down after the incident but couldn’t bring himself to throw away. They’re hidden in his closet now, along with the little scrapbook he’d kept of all his favorite pilots and explorers, pasting in pictures and articles about their exploits and even the occasional limited edition Space Explorer trading card. Shiro’s not the only name and picture in there, but he’s the most recent. Lance had stopped collecting after he’d heard about Kerberos.

Shiro looks like he’s aged about twenty years in the span of one. He’s still stunningly handsome, Lance stubbornly believes that nothing could ever make Shiro unattractive, but the shock of white hair at his forelock draws the eye, the scar across the bridge of his nose, the sheer bulk of his shoulders. He’s heavier than his Kerberos stats (which, yes, Lance has those pasted into his scrapbook, it’s important astronaut information, thank you), broader and stronger, more than could be expected from a year’s absence doing anything. The doctors had talked about it, had wanted to take bone marrow samples to see if something had been done to Shiro’s very skeleton. They weren’t sure if it was still human blood running in Shiro’s veins. 

He’s covered in scars. Like, _covered_ in scars, so many that it’s almost comical, impossible for them to have been from a real situation. Situations? Shiro looks like he’s been through a meat grinder but is still somehow whole, aside from his arm; his muscles intact, no real physical damage done, as if every single injury had been healed to a certain point and then left to scar on its own. Pidge said it couldn’t be accidental. An accident capable of causing so much extensive scarification would’ve killed the person.

“It doesn’t matter,” he tells Shiro, patting his limp human hand on the blanket. “You look good, no matter what anybody thinks. The white streak is really cool, you know? People dye their hair to look that cool.”

Shiro doesn’t say anything. Shiro breathes, in and out, beautiful and heartbreaking on Lance’s pillow. 

He ought to go to class. He’s probably being suspicious, not going to class. Lance doesn’t have fantastic grades or great simulator scores, but he’s got perfect attendance and reams and reams of notes, filled with as many doodles and diagrams in the margins as he could cram in. There are pictures of Shiro, too, little messy sketches between his equations, pictures of the Kerberos launch as Lance had imagined it taking place, pictures of jets and shuttles and cool spaceships. Lance isn’t an artist but he designed a pin-up image for his own private fighter jet that he won’t ever have. Before he’d latched onto “The Tailor” he’d been the Cuban Tornado, the Sapphire Baron, Ace (just Ace), the Gentleman Daredevil, the Sky Surfer, and also the Tiger Wolf Shark when he was about eight years old. He’d gone through a lot of failed nicknames and catchphrases, and his instructors had patiently asked him to just sign his papers with his actual name, which he bet they never had never told Shiro to do. Some of the professors have copies of Shiro’s essays as their examples, although they never identify him by name, but Lance has read every single one of them that he has access to, hoping to find some drop of insight from his idol underneath the dry subjects. He signed up for classes with as many of Shiro’s old teachers as he could. He marked out which sim machines Shiro was said to have favored. He had Shiro’s simulator scores, as well as the other high scores of his yearmates and recent graduates on handwritten notes tacked to his wall like a height chart, and put post its up whenever he had a good score that came somewhere in the neighborhood. Shiro’s scores are up at eye level. All of Lance’s posts its are down somewhere in the vicinity of his chest.

He used to daydream about closing that gap. About having been born just a little earlier, gotten through his schooling just a little quicker. He’d be the cool mysterious new kid, the one with the fantastic simulator scores, and maybe someone would mentioned it to Shiro, that _hey, Shirogane, some upstart’s coming for your record._

Shiro would laugh it off. The Shiro that Lance has heard about seems like that type of guy. It wouldn’t bother him if someone beat his scores. But maybe he’d be intrigued. Maybe he’d start hearing Lance’s name, and he’d drop by a class to see what all the fuss was about. Maybe he’d get assigned to demonstrate, or to assist a teacher, or maybe he’d get brought in to talk about the advanced classes available to upperclassmen. Maybe their gazes would meet. Maybe Shiro would pause, just slightly, and then go on like nothing had happened. 

Maybe he would be waiting after Lance got out of the simulator with a ‘good job, cadet’ and a small, personal smile, just for Lance. 

He’s had a lot of daydreams about this, and all the different ways it could go. They would see each other across the mess hall, Shiro surrounded by ‘friends’ that maybe didn’t get him the way that he wanted, while Lance was cool and aloof. Shiro was the popular star student, the kind that other people flocked around to try and get a little piece of shine for themselves, self-serving. Lance had seen it happen around other so called aces, as if they were doing some kind of special secret thing to get ahead, as if there was a trick to piloting or acing tests other than practice and hard work and maybe a smidge of teacher favoritism. Lance used to be one of those kids, fresh-faced and fawning, flocking like the other baby chicks around the upperclassmen until he realized that half of them hadn’t earned their faux celebrity statuses and were just assholes masquerading as big fish in a tiny pond. 

Shiro wasn’t like the others. Shiro wouldn’t be like the others. Shiro was humble, and didn’t get passes from the professors because he was rich, or because his family was made up of officers. Shiro worked for everything he had, and he didn’t gravitate toward the cliques of upperclassmen that stood in knots in the halls, forcing everyone to go around them like boulders parting a river, slouched and dangerous, smiling lazily while they eyed the new students like predators. Shiro wouldn’t participate in hazing. 

They could meet in the gym, late at night. Lance would be boxing, tape trailing from his taped knuckles, light and shadow playing across the bag as he pummels it. He looks graceful and sleek and powerful. He can’t decide if he’s shirtless or not. He pulls his fist back and lets fly, and the bag rocks from the impact, and then Shiro is there behind it, catching it, quirking a smile at him. 

He asks nonchalantly if Lance wants a spotter, but Lance sees the faint, faint edges of his nerves. They’re not supposed to be in here this late at night. Shiro is smiling, dressed in workout clothes, used to training by himself. He’s putting himself out there for Lance. He doesn’t usually ask strangers in the gym if they want company. He goes to the gym to get away from hangers on, to listen to his music and focus on something internal. Probably. Lance assumes that’s what people who go to the gym do. 

Lance… says something cool in response. He doesn’t know what, exactly, the specific phrasing always escapes him in this fantasy, but he says something intelligent and witty that indicates he would love a spotter and that he’s also not a desperate fanboy or a shitty, entitled, had-everything-handed-to-him type of cadet. Presumably there’s a cool phrase that sums all of this up. Lance says it, whatever it is, and Shiro’s smile warms just that much more. 

Shiro spots him with the punching bag, holding it in place while Lance gives it all of his best combos. He probably throws a cool spin kick in just for good measure. Maybe they talk a little, Shiro commenting on his technique, or maybe it’s a strangely comfortable silence, moving in sync with each other. Lance doesn’t think he’s been in sync like that with anyone in his life, but he wants to be. He wants to know what it would be like to be that comfortable with another body in his orbit, that they just know how to move around each other. He wants to have that with someone, someday.

They move on to sparring, because Shiro mentions diffidently that he doesn’t have a regular sparring partner even though they both know that everyone in the building would trip over themselves to assist Shiro with anything. It’s a natural extension of their conversation, if they were having one. It’s definitely not like the awkward, embarrassing pair up sparring that happens in the combat classes, where Lance always gets stuck with the sweatiest or the clumsiest person in class and ends up with an elbow in his gut and hands flailing in his face. He doesn’t know how a well-funded and allegedly prestigious place like Garrison can manage to have combat classes that are barely a cut above high school PE classes and twice as desperately humiliating, but they manage. God, do they manage. 

It’s not like that with Shiro. Shiro doesn’t try to trip him, or call him scrawny, or any of the bullshit that his other classmates do. Shiro takes him seriously. Shiro is impressed when he does something impressive. Shiro is a better fighter than Lance, of course, because Shiro is good at _everything,_ and just look at those arms, Shiro obviously put in his time at the gym, but Lance keeps up with him. Lance pictures himself doing something fancy and flexible and impressive, something a little bit flirty but not too flirty. He finds reasons to show off his flexibility. Shiro tries not to dwell on the long, long lines of Lance’s legs in his workout clothes, the slender span of his hips. Lance tries not to dwell on Shiro’s shoulders and the tempting curve at the small of his back. They catch each other sneaking looks. They are sweaty and disgusting but they smile at each other anyway. Lance makes Shiro laugh. They start a tally of wins and losses. They make a habit of meeting each other in the empty gym for rematches, all alone and unsupervised.

(All the gyms on base are locked up tight after hours. Lance used to hang around hopefully, trying to find an inconspicuous way in, but apparently all the expensive equipment is more important than Lance’s potential gym dates. Going in during the daytime is basically an invitation to be stuffed in a locker, or to be stared at like Lance has broken some unspoken rule by daring to set foot inside. Same goes with the simulator after hours, when he thought he might be able to put in a little extra time and practice. He can sign up for extra time but he knows none of the instructors will ever give it to him, his scores don’t merit being given the chance.) 

But fuck it, this is his fantasy, and he can do what he wants. They spend time together away from the crush of crowds and the fake adoration of other students. They get to talk about real shit, things that Shiro doesn’t talk about with his other friends because he knows he can trust Lance. Lance tells him how scared he is about everything, the imposter syndrome he tries his best to overcompensate for. This is his one shot at the pilot program, and it’s not like he’s not _trying,_ he just can’t seem to stand up next to these kids that make it look easy as breathing, or the ones that come from money and their parents know all the professors and they come from some long bloodline of officers like piloting ability is somehow hereditary. Lance knows Garrison wants the best of the best. Garrison wants people like Shiro headlining their programs, posing for headshots for recruitment posters and attending charity functions. Shiro is gorgeous, and humble, and smart and amazing and he’s exactly the kind of guy that should be leading an elite team into space. 

Lance is just a number. If he doesn’t make the cut, he can settle for second best and go into cargo transport and try not to let resentment fester, or he can walk away from his dream of going to space, pretend Garrison was never part of his life. He could go home and get a real job doing something with his feet on the ground, as his mama would say. He knows that not every cadet makes it to the end, and especially not in the specific programs they might’ve had their hopes pinned on. People have to settle, sometimes. Exceptions won’t be made for someone like him. 

Shiro listens. Shiro doesn’t laugh at him, or try to tell him it’s all in his head. Lance doesn’t know what Shiro would say, but he says _something,_ and whatever it is makes Lance feel better. It makes Lance feel like someone understands, and that someone cares. Maybe Shiro offers to tutor him or something, but Lance doesn’t dwell on that. He wouldn’t want to take advantage of Shiro’s position and Shiro’s kindness just to get something for himself.

It’s better to daydream about other things. Their first kiss is either in the simulator, the cramped space hot and enclosed, the screens showing fake starfields stretching out ahead of them, or maybe in the library, snuck behind the shelves, Lance’s hands pressed lightly against Shiro’s broad, broad uniformed chest, the quiet noises around them of pages flipping and people walking, all oblivious. Lance sneaks into Shiro’s dorm room after curfew, sitting on Shiro’s bed and Shiro’s sheets, the only light in the room from the dim shining lamp on Shiro’s desk where Shiro probably spends all his time studying like the good student he is, and Lance coaxes him away, luring him to sit on the floor against the bed, tipping his head up so Lance can kiss him upside down, smiling. He rests his hands on Shiro’s shoulders, and Shiro reaches up to cup the back of his head tenderly. Or maybe they’re on the rooftop, wrapped together in a blanket, sharing treats sent from Lance’s family in his latest care package, the closest thing to a picnic they can manage. Shiro nips at Lance’s fingers and Lance pinches his cheeks, and smooths his fingers over the plushness of Shiro’s lips until he’s soft and pliant, grinning under Lance’s hand. Lance imagines them looking up at the stars, faint and twinkling overhead, beckoning, Shiro’s head in his lap while Lance strokes his hair. They go out and get lost in the desert. Shiro takes a hoverbike, because Lance has always wanted to ride on a really nice hoverbike and he decides this is his fantasy so Shiro just has one, or has access to one, whatever. Lance wraps his arms around Shiro’s waist and leans his cheek against Shiro’s shoulder blade. Technically they should be wearing helmets, but this is Lance’s fantasy. He likes to bury his face in the back of Shiro’s neck. 

Maybe they drive out to one of the greasy spoon diners that populate the nearest desert towns like frozen moments from the 50s; waitresses snapping their gum, cooks in stained white aprons leaning over the counter to yell Order Up. Lance and Shiro don’t call it a date. Calling it a date seems like a jinx waiting to happen. They steal food off each other’s plates, and Lance says witty and funny things that always make Shiro laugh, and Shiro doesn’t look at anyone else the entire time. Shiro lets Lance put his hand in his back pocket when they walk around, and their shoulders brush together comfortably. Shiro likes it when Lance wears his jackets. Presumably Shiro has jackets, somewhere in his closet. He’d wear Shiro’s uniform jacket. 

He tells the unconscious Shiro lying on his bed all of this, every single word, because the silence in the room while Shiro sleeps gets oppressive after a while, heavy and hanging and awful. Lance doesn’t like to leave him alone without at least a little bit of noise, soft music or the TV set on the lowest setting or the radio, or something. Lance rambles about anything and everything he can think of, silly date fantasies included, gesturing wildly even though Shiro can’t see it. He tells Shiro about his classes and his professors and his yearmates and his homework, his less than brilliant simulator performances, the girls that look at him or don’t look at him, about the things he misses from home, how he met Hunk, how he met Pidge. He takes phone calls from his family inside his own stupid closet because he doesn’t want to leave Shiro alone but also doesn’t want to be yelling on the phone next to him. He knows himself, if he stares at Shiro while he talks he’s going to accidentally say Shiro’s name. 

“I’m not a weird stalker, I promise,” he assures Shiro. “I know that you’re an independent free thinking person with your own wants and needs and, uh, romantic entanglements that have nothing to do with me and probably never will. I know you had your own friends, and you probably had random cadets throwing themselves at you all the time.” 

What he doesn’t say is that he doesn’t know where any of them are, a year later. The students that used to make up Shiro’s fanclub seemed to just shrug and go on with their lives, moving on to other things, latching onto other favorites and other prodigies. Someone else’s face went up on the recruitment posters. Garrison kept having their charity functions with their boys and girls in slick, pressed uniforms and polite smiles, trotted out like show ponies during the speeches. They mention Kerberos, but it’s always in the vein of sacrifice in the name of advancement, like Takashi Shirogane and Matthew Holt and Dr. Samuel Holt had somehow died for a noble cause instead of what was probably a terrible accident. Lance never bought the whole ‘pilot error’ bullshit, even before Pidge barged into his life with charts and graphs and tinhat conspiracy theories about the Kerberos mission. It was sad, and it was a stupid, stupid waste, but Lance figured it had to have been an accident. 

Not for the first time, Lance wonders what Garrison told Shiro’s family. He knows there was a funeral, because he almost skipped classes to try and attend it. Hunk had yelled at him about deliberately sabotaging himself because he had a test and he wasn’t even trying to study, and finally punched below the belt with the awful, painful statement that Shiro wouldn’t want anyone to flunk out because of him. 

Shiro wouldn’t. Even a perfect stranger, even a dumb kid that only ever saw Shiro across crowded rooms or on television. Shiro wouldn’t want anyone to sacrifice for him.

In any case, Lance doesn’t know how to get in touch with Shiro’s family now, or what he would say to them. Technically, _technically,_ Lance and Hunk and Pidge are kidnappers, or maybe thieves since Shiro is still officially considered dead, which is just a weird and creepy thought. But also, technically, Garrison should have brought Shiro to the city hospital an hour away and notified his family, and not had creepy dudes in labcoats talking about sawing off his arm. Pidge insists that Shiro had to have been captured by aliens for the past year, which, okay, the alien clothing and the crashed alien ship do add weight to that theory, but it’s not like they have any real proof. They can’t just go to the police, or to the media, and hope that publicity somehow protects them. Garrison has all the evidence. All they have is Shiro, unconscious, smuggled into Lance’s bed and vulnerable, and they don’t have any idea of who to trust with him. Lance is personally inclined to say nobody. He’s seen a movie before in his lifetime, he knows how it works when the plucky group of nobodies has something that would embarrass or cause trouble for a big, official organization. As far as he’s concerned, Garrison has proven themselves the bad guys. 

Waiting for Shiro to wake up is the only plan they have right now. It’s not a great plan, Lance will be the first to admit that, but he also thinks that Shiro deserves a say in whatever happens next. Pidge seems to forget that part a lot. Pidge is antisocial and secretive to the point of paranoia but also really bossy, and Lance has caught him staring at Shiro when he thinks no one else is looking.

Well, too bad. Lance already called the spot of ‘you don’t know me but you’ve been really formative to my life and I would do pretty much anything for you’ guy and they don’t have room for two of those. Pidge is still ‘conspiracy theorist internet person’ and ‘probably a criminal on the dark web,’ which is, in Lance’s opinion, a very essential figure in their group. He pictures Pidge triumphantly holding up proof that aliens exist for the entire Internet like some kind of nerd messiah, a dull, many-voiced roar echoing from a billion basements in response. 

Hunk, of course, is the ‘we shouldn’t be doing this’ guy, which Lance could really do without but at least he knows that Hunk isn’t about to rat out on them to the authorities. Hunk has also seen a movie before, and he knows what always ends up happening to the snitch character. 

Lance just hopes that Jared or Juniper knows what always ends up happening to the snitch character. 

He leans over to fluff Shiro’s pillow, trying not to focus on the way Shiro’s lips are slightly parted. He doesn’t stink of metal and jet fuel anymore, thanks to Lance’s efforts with a sponge, but his bandages still smell like the Garrison clean room. Lance’s fingers itch to grab more scented lotion to try and counter the smell, to dab it over the scar on the bridge of Shiro’s nose. Lance isn’t exactly an expert on scarring but he can tell it’s not fresh, it’s been long enough for the skin to discolor and pull. Shiro probably feels it every time he speaks, or smiles, or makes any kind of expression with his face. Lance wants to cover it in the most expensive scar cream he can find. The scar itself is cool-looking, rakish, but he can’t imagine what happened to hurt Shiro so close to his eyes. It probably wasn’t accidentally flicking yourself in the chin with a bullwhip, fending off a lion. It probably wasn’t cool at all. It was probably really shitty and dangerous and painful, and Lance doesn’t like the thought of Shiro having to be reminded of it all the time. 

This is what Shiro should’ve come home to, he thinks and doesn’t say. A private room in an expensive hospital, the very best care money could buy, cute attentive nurses making sure that Shiro had everything he needed. Care for his scars, his injuries, his crazy cyborg arm. He should’ve had doctors helping him, not talking over his head. He should’ve had flowers, welcome back posters, crowds of people crying and smiling and joyful that he’d come back, somehow, safely. It should’ve been a hero’s welcome. Lance is indignant on Shiro’s behalf. He doesn’t like the way Shiro’s lips are so desperately chapped and bitten, his scars untreated, his skin so pale, his ribs prominent and individual under Lance’s fingers. He’s a solid mass of muscle but his cheekbones are too sharp, his eyes bruised. There’s a small, small chunk of cartilage missing from his left ear that makes Lance think horribly of the stock tags they put on cattle. 

 

“I watched the launch,” he says quietly, the 

 

 

HANDS screamed pidge

Isn’t everyone a little bit in love with him?

I thought you and hunk were boyfriends, actually - hunk can do way better than me

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	3. Starfall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt and Keith, in orbit.

Matt is seven years old when he decides he wants to be an astronaut. 

Before then, he’d entertained vague ambitions of becoming a giant radioactive lizard-monster or a superhero, and for one memorable week he’d had his heart set on becoming a construction crane. Other kids wanted to be actors, racecar drivers, jet pilots-- even Katie admitted she liked the thought of flying, even though she specifically wanted to become a jet that could transform into a robot. What was the point if you didn’t have _hands,_ she argued, waving the pieces of her engineering kit for emphasis.

And it’s not because his dad already is one, or because he’s grown up around the scientific community and the aerospace community, hearing them reduce the wonders of spaceflight to grumbling about budgets and dehydrated vegetables and the boiling point of human blood, but because his mom can’t handle another discussion with the science museum staff about her hellion children dissecting their kid-friendly experiment displays in front of a rapt/horrified audience of other families and drags him and Katie off to see one of those science movies in the theater with the huge curved screens, ordering them to not say the words _scientific inaccuracy_ for at least forty minutes. Matt cranes his neck to watch the stars wheeling above and below him from the camera POV inside a spacecraft cockpit, entranced and a little scared at the feeling of falling into them, if he let himself. He clutches the armrests of the chair tightly to ground himself and sucks in shallow, thrilled breaths. Katie is out of her chair and has her little fists pressed up against the glass of the partition they’re sitting behind, fearless. His mother sighs and pulls out a little spray bottle of glass cleaner from her purse.

Most of the footage being shown is at least a generation old: dusty gray moonscapes full of hollows and shadows, footprints and tire-tracks memorialized forever in the dirt. Mars, red and rocky, the three established base camps and their cramped interiors, full of grinning international scientific teams that Matt knows full well probably actually hate each other. There are close-ups of the gas planets, gorgeous long romantic shots of sunrises and sunsets, even a long steady segment from a drone shadowing a comet, its pitted surface tumbling end over end in silence. 

The narration talks about the various space programs and their missions, about the technology being invented, the people pushing themselves to the limits for the sake of knowledge, about the discoveries that have been made and the discoveries still waiting. There is a swelling instrumental score. Matt watches through the helmet cam of the first Ganymede drop team, setting foot on the moon’s surface for the first time in human history. Jupiter looms impossibly huge in the background, dwarfing the horizon. 

After the movie finishes he and Katie both clamor unanimously to visit the spaceflight exhibit, which includes a partial replica of one of the Phobos fly-by ships. Inside, the viewing ports are all gigantic television screens, simulating the endless black and the flickering of stars, and Matt parks himself in the cockpit, laying down on the uncomfortable metal grating and watching as the footage plays of Mars rising up incrementally to swallow the entire screen. Katie sits in the pilot’s chair, pushing every button she can find to push and irritated that the only ones that do anything are the probe arms, shifting clunkily left and right with loud hydraulic hisses like cheap animatronics, and they don’t even grab anything. 

Katie gets a build-a-robot-arm kit from the giftshop that’s probably meant for kids three times her age. Matt picks out a space colony set, designed to simulate all the trials and tribulations of establishing a base camp. His mother sighs about the lack of glamorous marketing for climatology, her personal field, and lets her husband the microbiologist wax lyrical about bacteria in extraterrestrial dirt samples when he gets home to find both his offspring mad for anything space.

Matt can’t explain it in words. He doesn’t know why the lonely, piercing image of a planet rising on the edge of an alien horizon catches at him the way it does, makes him burn with something hungry and wanting and unfamiliar. 

Katie grows out of the phase, more or less, being more of a pragmatic soul. She likes to get her hands dirty, likes to see all the moving parts, likes the regimented structure of mechanics and coding. Matt remains fascinated by the beauty of things that are too large for him. The images stay seared in his brain: human shadows stretching long and inky on alien soil, human footprints, human civilization etched into the bedrock of an untouched world. He wants to stand there. He wants to see it for himself. He plasters his bedroom walls with posters and charts and panoramic photographs that stretch the length of the room, showing him the cliffs and coronae of Miranda; spacecraft schematics and topographical maps, Neptune’s deep sapphire clouds and Jupiter’s red, staring eye. His blankets swirl with photo-accurate galaxy patterns, and he carefully orders the glowing stars on his ceiling into proper constellations, naming them one after the other in his head as he lies in bed, starting with the Babylonian star catalogues. 

The Scimitar. The Bull of Heaven. The Seed-Furrow. The Lion.

He sneaks out his bedroom window sometimes, when the house is silent and his brain is buzzing and he can’t shut off the fizzing white static of his thoughts. He climbs carefully out onto the roof, the chill night air seeping into his pajamas and twisting cool fingers through his hair, laying out a nest of blankets so he can burrow into them and look up at the real thing, glittering like diamonds scattered across black velvet. He raises his hand to them, moonlight slanting between his fingers, and traces their shapes in the air, whispering their names in all the languages he knows.

 

****

 

Keith is seven years old when he realizes there’s something wrong with him.

He remembers the quiet admonishments from his father to keep his head down, to not speak to strangers, to watch adults warily and always, always lie when they asked him about his mother. His mother isn’t dead, but the rest of the world isn’t allowed to know that, his dad says. He says he’ll explain when Keith is older. 

 

 

 

 

 

waugh

 

There are expectations when everybody in your family is a genius. Matt stays up late with his books and learns to entertain himself quietly in a world full of adults. There is school, of course, but there are always conferences, conventions, press briefings, award ceremonies, long nights and long research projects. He reads because that’s what there is to do, long after the batteries on all his mobile devices are dead. There are people who think it’s cute that Matt can recite the periodic table and people who think it’s nurture instead of nature, and ask him if he wouldn’t rather be outside playing with other kids, as if there’s an excess of other kids hanging around the laboratories and the buildings where his parents work. He and Katie grew up napping on lab cots, wearing safety glasses and watching the lights on the centrifuge, being chased away from the toxic sludge called coffee that’s always being left unattended in little white styrofoam cups on various desks.

Science isn’t glamorous. Science is long hours and 

At school, Matt is a favorite of teachers and a favorite victim of bigger, stronger kids until he learns not to talk so much, not to always have the answer first. He’s praised as a model student because he speaks politely to adults and doesn’t speak at all to other kids. Accelerated programs and early graduations make him the smallest and the youngest, over and over again, and he builds up his armor and his habits, ignoring what he needs to, burying himself in information, navigating the sticky social quagmires of his classes and his classmates. Having an astronaut for a father makes you cool only up until a certain age. After that, it’s all conspicuous absences and classified information and doubting asshole kids, and counselors with careful smiles that ask him if everything is okay at home. 

_Home_ is fine, home is great. Home is his

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	4. Pull

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some incoherent S1 garbage, and apparently a prototype for Emperor's Service that I have no memory of writing.

Lance knew something was wrong the moment he felt Shiro drop out of the lion bond.

There was a sudden, sucking absence in his chest, like someone had reached in and removed some vital organ he’d never noticed before until it was gone. He doubled over against the harness straps, gasping, one hand clutched at his sternum, and he heard all of Blue’s systems whine around him. They were supposed to be retreating hell for leather back to the Castle of Lions, a rescued Allura snatched up by Pidge and Green while the whole pissed off Galra armada howled at their heels, but Blue’s speed was slacking off for no apparent reason, and the spot that Shiro’s calm, steady presence usually occupied in the fledgling lion bond was just… gone.

“Guys?” He twisted around, trying to find the Black Lion on any of his viewscreens or scanners, but the only thing for what seemed like miles in any direction were clouds of red enemy IFF tags. Blue shuddered oddly and sent him an inexplicable image of an oil slick on water when he tried to push her engines. “Guys, what the fuck, did any of you just feel that…?”

“Everyone, get back to the Castle of Lions.” Shiro was too well disciplined to let anything like anxiety into his tone, but he was broadcasting from his helmet comm, not from the cockpit of the Black Lion, and his breathing was too measured to be anything but deliberate. “There’s something wrong with Black, I’m getting system errors-- Keith, _no._ ” 

The Red Lion was already on the verge of breaking formation, wavering, and for a dizzying second Lance could feel a storm of emotion that didn’t belong to him-- an overlay of Red’s cockpit, gloved hands clutching the controls too tightly, Keith’s fear and frustration and guilt (guilt?) rolling through him, and now he could feel Shiro secondhand, piggybacking on Keith’s more sensitive senses 

Shiro was afraid. There was something-- moving, something _hunting_ through the lion bond, overshadowing Shiro, and he knew exactly what it was, he’d felt it before--

And then Lance was back in his own body, reeling; Shiro had thrown them both out of his mind and slammed up shields, and left a command ringing through them with all the irresistible dominant authority of the Black Paladin: _retreat._

Shiro never did that to them. Shiro had sworn he never would, denounced it as coercion with a certain bitter familiarity, although Allura insisted that it was only an extension of the Black Lion’s natural authority over the others. It was a sign of a powerful will, strong enough to hold a team together. It was a specialty of the previous Black Paladin, she’d said, and then refused to say more on the subject. 

 

waugh

 

 

“Shiro’s down, there’s something wrong with the Black Lion.” Maybe an idiot would have mistaken Keith’s flat tone for calm, but Lance could _feel_ the roil of emotions behind the words, and knew immediately that Keith was about to fuck them all

“I’m going after him.”

Gee.

“Paladins, do _not_ engage.” That was Allura, sending from Pidge’s cockpit ahead of them. They were nearly to the Castle ship, lingering on the edge of the battlefield and preparing to beat a hasty retreat via wormhole out of the system. “Zarkon is… this is Zarkon’s doing, I repeat, do not go after the Black Lion and do _not_ try to engage Zarkon, none of you are ready to face him in combat.”

“I’m not leaving Shiro behind.” Keith’s frustration rippled through the bond and sure enough, the Red Lion was already darting out of its place in their loose battle formation, breaking the line they were trying to hold to cover Allura’s escape. He was heading for Zarkon’s flagship and oh, yes, of course, that was where the Black Lion was, hanging motionless in space. 

“Goddammit, Keith!” Lance and Blue shuddered together as a burst of laser fire hit their suddenly unprotected flank while Hunk and Yellow scrambled to close the distance. “Shiro’s fine, he’s totally fine, we’ll pull him in with the Castle’s tractor beam, don’t you dare leave my ass hanging out in the open here, _why are you like this--_ ”

“I have missed you, my Champion,” Zarkon purred directly into his ear. Lance shrieked; Blue went tumbling into a headlong roll as his hands jerked on the controls and narrowly avoided smacking into Yellow as Hunk squawked in protest. 

“How is Zarkon on our comms-- “ Pidge began, disbelieving, and then descended into the righteous fury of any communications officer. “I’ll lock him out, everybody give me five ticks.” 

“We don’t have five ticks! We’re all supposed to be _leaving!_ ” Lance yelled, heart still pounding wildly. He was hearing the voice over Shiro’s helmet comm, but also through the lions? The Black Lion was-- fucking _watching,_ standing still and silent on the deck of the flagship like a spectator or a judge, equidistant between Shiro and Zarkon, and somehow all of the lions were seeing what Black was seeing. What Black was waiting for.

Shiro, battered but on his feet, his cyborg arm glowing brightly against the flagship’s monochrome hull. Emperor Zarkon tossing aside his heavy cloak to reveal armor the color of dried blood, real armor, like conquered a thousand planets personally type armor, and the Black Paladin’s bayard in his clawed hand, rippling with corrupted purple energy as it manifested as an enormous longsword. 

Well that explained a lot of shitty things, all of a sudden, and Lance stopped pouring _you fucker i hate you_ into the mental link in Keith’s direction and instead started pushing _go go go_ at him, as if Keith needed the encouragement. His fear for Shiro was a thick metal taste in Lance’s mouth. The retreating Green Lion was close enough to the Castle now that Hunk and Lance could switch from defense to offense, both turning instantly to run interference with the smaller Galra starfighters that were trying to stall Keith. There was no way their larger, slower lions could keep up with Red’s frantic pace but they sent strafing shots across the noses of Galra ships edging too near, clearing a path. 

The Black Lion sat its giant metal ass down like a fucking sphinx and waited for somebody to be killed. 

On the deck of the flagship, now apparently a dueling field, Shiro charged at Zarkon, sweeping in his glowing hand like a sword. Lance pushed out his senses the way he’d been taught, reaching-- but instead of Shiro’s normal presence, there was something at the other end that barely felt human at all, a blistering maelstrom of rage and instinct. He recoiled, shocked. That couldn’t be Shiro. Shiro wasn’t-- bloodthirsty, Shiro didn’t think about dismemberment when he fought, the way the crowds roared for him, hot black ichor soaking his arms up to the elbows, and above everything, Zarkon’s cool, judging yellow gaze--

“I’m not your Champion anymore,” Shiro rasped out, near wordless with fury. “I’m not what you made me.”

Zarkon’s faint pity was a tangible thing, weaving insidiously through the lion bond. “Is that what you tell yourself? Is that what you tell your friends, in hopes they don’t look any closer?” 

Lance shuddered. There were images now, pouring in an unwelcome river into all of their heads: Shiro’s victories

 

waugh

 

thought he could sense something very faintly through the lion bond but it didn’t feel anything like Shiro’s normal presence, instead a blistering maelstrom of rage that put Keith’s regular flares of temper to shame. It hardly felt human and Lance’s mind instinctively flinched away from it. That couldn’t be Shiro. Trying to reach out to him through the bond or even over the helmet comms to tell him that Keith was coming at him like a trainwreck would’ve been like trying to shout down the roar of a forest fire. 

There was something else there, too. Something huge and alien and monstrous, threaded through the lion bond like it belonged there. 

 

He’d never felt anything like it and found himself shrinking away physically, praying that it hadn’t noticed him. 

 

FIX THIS SECTION

He grappled after Allura and Coran’s tedious lessons about how psychic projections worked-- he had to picture himself hidden, picture himself tiny and insignificant, he was a small tiny fish in the ocean with blue and gray scales, perfectly camouflaged, he looked like the water around him and nothing could see him like this, he was flotsam, he was just debris carried along in the current--

Zarkon and Shiro were fighting in earnest now, a whirlwind of feints and strikes. Shiro was fast, agile, and savage, able to use his cyborg arm as both blade and grapple, but Zarkon towered over him and threw off each attack easily, 

waugh

 

flowing out of the way of Shiro’s attacks like water and painfully, visibly controlling the rhythm of the fight. There had to be a gravity field making their movements possible but Lance knew, abruptly, that Zarkon was exactly the kind of opponent that would give that advantage to an enemy. He was brutal and graceful and there was some kind of _ringing_ in the lion bond every time he spoke, that Lance found himself holding his breath for. That voice was nearly a caress, dark and smooth and promising, and Lance didn’t know whether he wanted to curl into a ball with his hands clapped over his ears or push Blue in closer.

Zarkon called Shiro by his full name. He told him how proud he was of his accomplishments, how strong Shiro had been to have come so far against such odds, how determined and dedicated he must have been to defy his own inherently weak, human nature. Shiro wasn’t talking back. Shiro was breathing in short, staccato bursts, and they all knew that he was afraid. Zarkon easily sidestepped a ragged attack and forced Shiro hard to his knees, a hand closing mercilessly on the back of his neck and claws digging into his suit. Shiro made a noise like he’d been gutted and the glow from the cyborg arm seemed to flicker, once, twice, and then extinguished in a great flare, its purple light crawling across Shiro’s body and flowing up Zarkon’s arm as if returning home. 

“Stop resisting,” Zarkon told him, infinitely patient. Shiro was trying to struggle out of the grasp, clutching futilely at a gauntleted forearm. He looked like a toy next to him. “You have carried out the mission we shaped you for beautifully, and now your burden is at an end. You were never the Black Lion’s true pilot, you were only ever my proxy, carrying my energy inside of you to facilitate the connection.”

“N-no, that’s not--” 

“No?” Zarkon yanked him up to his feet, pulling him back flush against the hard edges of his Galra armor. “Did you not wish to be free of the guilt you carried? Did you not confess yourself unworthy of the mantle of leadership, after failing the men who followed you? I took pity on you, my Champion. You begged me for mercy, for absolution, and I granted it, pathetic though your abasement was. You thanked me for it on your knees. You swore your loyalty. Perhaps you do not remember our bargain? How I allowed you to escape to your planet’s surface unharmed, when we could have self-destructed the pod you stole any time we wished?”

Shiro said nothing, gasping loud and wet. Lance felt sick. 

“You have fulfilled your promise,” the Emperor said, and this time it echoed and reverberated through the lion bond, projecting into all of their heads. “You have brought me the children who are to be my new paladins.” 

Shiro jerked and turned as best he could in Zarkon’s grip, stark horror in his voice as the Red Lion’s massive shadow suddenly fell over all of the flagship’s deck, maw open in a silent roar while Keith gunned the engines viciously. “No, no, Keith, go back--!”

The Black Lion reared up, quick as lightning, pilotless, and snagged Red by the back of the neck like a mother cat scruffing her kitten. Like Zarkon was holding Shiro, paralyzed and helpless. Keith yelled in fury at the impact, warning sirens coming to life and blaring in the background of his cockpit. The two lions were snapping and snarling at each other in horrible silence, their claws digging deep furrows in the flagship’s armor as they scrabbled for purchase, heaving against each other. The size difference between them was ludicrous. Red was more agile, twisting nearly double on herself to rake with her hind claws but Black was a fucking powerhouse, her brilliant gold eyes somehow menacing in their blankness and her wings arched high and aggressive over her back. Something like cold amusement rippled through the lion bond and Lance watched in slow horror as the wings suddenly sprouted purple lines of energy like _laser feathers,_ shimmering from the heat against the absolute cold of space.

This was the kind of control the real Black Paladin had over his lion, a small voice whispered inside him. It was beautiful and terrifying at once, the way the lions were meant to be, feared and worshipped by civilizations all across the universe as harbingers of conquest. He pictured-- was shown?-- the Altean Empire at the height of its glory, sprawling and vast and controlled, utterly, no race in the universe daring to oppose its might, every sentient species bowing down before the power of the lions of Voltron as though they were gods in their own right, and at their head a shining, terrible figure, a high king that was also a priest, a benevolent messiah that inspired loyalty and devotion more absolute than any pale shade of love--

“--ance! Lance! Hunk, wake up! Please, both of you have to wake up!”

The sudden noise made him jerk, Allura’s voice coming not through the main comm systems on the console speakers but directly from his helmet comm. Somehow Blue and Yellow had drifted closer to the flagship, their weapons quiet (when had Lance taken his finger off the trigger?), pulled in as if by gravity towards the fight. Black had a great paw pinning Red’s shoulders down and Keith was spitting curses in Korean over the comms, Red’s limbs scrabbling spastically in the faint hope of landing some raking blow. They slowed even as Lance watched, as if the lion had come to some acceptance of her defeat, and the Black Lion leaned forward almost delicately to bite down on the back of her neck in some hideous parody of a mating. Violet energy rushed into the places where fangs pierced armor. Red went limp and Keith made a noise that Lance had never heard before, some cross between a snarl and a moan, and a shiver went rippling through all the lions and their pilots. Red had lost her challenge. Zarkon himself had not moved an inch while the battle came perilously close to where he and Shiro stood. He was in control. He was completely and utterly--

“Paladins, Zarkon is controlling the others through the Black Lion.” Now Allura sounded scared, Lance realized distantly. He almost wished she hadn’t interrupted. They were all awaiting the outcome of the battle, lions and paladins both, watching expectantly. Even the other Galra ships had stopped firing, awaiting their master’s orders.

Awaiting their master’s orders. That was what they were all doing. He shuddered violently and tore his helmet off, a hand pressed over his mouth to quell the nausea trying to rise in his throat, taking great, heaving breaths. How long had he been sitting here watching? How long had Blue let him drift, listening to-- to _Zarkon,_ whispering in his head about glory and power?

Allura was still broadcasting, small and tinny as he picked up his helmet with trembling hands and jammed it back on. Hunk’s voice came over the console speakers, sounding as unnerved as Lance felt. 

“I--I copy, Allura, I’m here.”

“ _We’re_ here,” Lance echoed shakily.

“Oh! Thank goodness. Now both of you listen to me, please, you cannot allow Zarkon to affect you through the bond. The Black Lion is the leader and all the others defer to it, you can’t let your lions influence you, you have to remember who you are. Retreat, please. Come back to the Castle, we must get everyone away.”

Pidge cut in with the same protest Lance and Hunk had on their lips. “But-- Keith and Shiro--”

“Are already lost to us,” Allura declared, voice nearly breaking. “I’m flying the Green Lion and I can feel her wavering. She nearly doubled back before, and she is refusing to listen to Pidge. We’re docking at the Castle now. We’ll be able to lock the lions in their hangars and retreat, but you and Hunk _must_ come back now.” 

Leaving. She was talking about leaving Keith and Shiro behind in Zarkon’s hands, along with their lions. 

“Zarkon must not take Voltron,” Allura said fiercely, almost as if she had read his mind. “If we stay, he will pull us all down one by one. I can feel him through the bond, and I know you can as well.” An awful dread crept into her words. “He is coming for you.” 

He was. Even as Blue and Yellow’s engines fired in tandem, spinning them away from the flagship, Lance could feel that awful presence from earlier stirring. It was moving through the fragile strands of the lion bond like a predator, seeking, and there were Galra cruisers and a thin screen of starfighters now between them and the Castle. They’d flanked the two lions quietly during the duel, but were still withholding fire as though they knew it wasn’t necessary.

“Lance…” Hunk began, a private channel between the two of them. They couldn’t just run. Garrison rules were clear about abandoning a compromised missions, sacrificing a few for the sake of the many and all that crap, but that wasn’t what paladins of Voltron did, even in the face of disaster.

Behind them, Red had been allowed to rise and was now sitting with perfect, ominous docility next to her sister lion, both of them crouched at attention before Zarkon. Violet electricity crackled and arced over their metal skin.

“I know!” Lance swallowed down a burning, bitter lump in his throat. “Just get going, I’m gonna follow you.” He jabbed buttons and opened a private channel to Keith’s helmet radio, which functioned independently from the Red Lion’s compromised systems. Lance could feel Keith only weakly through the bond, a flame flickering at a distance through thickening fog and smoke. He was given an image; Keith still strapped into the pilot’s chair like he’d been chained there, warning lights strobing as his hands scraped at useless controls that refused to obey him.

“Keith, come on, I know you can hear me, you gotta get out of the fucking lion and use your jetpack or something, okay, you need to get out of there right now, the lions are compromised and Allura’s called a retreat--”

 _ **NO,**_ Keith snarled back soundlessly through the bond, enough emotion pushing the sending to make Lance wince. His voice over the speakers was ragged and raw. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He might have meant that he was refusing to abandon his lion, but the unspoken words reverberating through the bond were _I’m not leaving him alone again._

“Keith, you stupid fuckface, don’t do this--”

The interior lights of Blue’s cockpit abruptly cut out. So did the thrum of the engines, though Lance’s hand hadn’t been anywhere near the throttle. He was plunged into a near total darkness, the only noise his rabbit-fast breathing in his ears and the only lights coming from his armor, reflecting an image of himself against the sudden black of the viewscreen. 

“Oh what the fuck, what the _fuck,_ no no no no no.” He unsnapped his harness and stretched for an emergency switch on the console, only to snatch his hand back with a yelp as an arc of purple electricity stung his fingers. Through the viewscreen he could see ahead of him all of Yellow’s running lights and engines had gone dark. They were both of them drifting, paralyzed and offline.

Keith’s breathing went high and panicked over the helmet comm in Lance’s ear. “Shiro--”

**Come down from your lion, little one.**

It poured down Lance’s spine like icewater, as powerful and inexorable as the tide. Maybe he gasped. Maybe Hunk said something over the radio. He couldn’t hear anything except that awful, encompassing voice, his body ringing like a struck bell from every word dropped directly into his brain. He felt suddenly like he was floating, separate and distant from the parts of him that were still hunched over in the command chair, muscles locked, hands frozen to unresponsive controls. The tiny thread of the lion bond that Allura and Coran had lauded so much in training now yawned wide and awful around him, recreating itself as the vastness of space, or maybe a black and endless ocean. He was nothing but an insignificant speck floating in the void without control or direction. Blue wasn’t here with him and he was nothing without her. If he screamed, he would not be heard. If he ran, he would go nowhere. The only thing beneath his feet was his own reflected, distorted image: a terrified, skinny teenager in a suit of alien armor that seemed suddenly ridiculous on him. A dead paladin’s uniform that he had stuffed himself inside. 

He wrapped his arms around himself and tried not to look at the wavering reflection below him, which no longer resembled him at all. 

Before him was a rising, overwhelming presence, a shadow thing outlined against the not-stars like a cresting wave, the kind that swallowed ships whole and left nothing in its wake but foam trails on the surface. It could have been a lion or a dragon or a demon, spreading wings made out of nothing. Lance saw it as water, rearing high to drown everything in its path. 

It was focused on something between them that sparked and guttered in the black expanse of the void-ocean, an exhausted, shivering little wisp of presence. Keith, still fighting. Keith with his hand outstretched to the thing about to destroy him, reaching for Shiro, who Lance understood was somewhere in the middle of that black water, suspended, floating calmly and silently like a fresh-drowned corpse.

Lance felt it take Keith. He felt it pour down like some kind of slow motion avalanche of sucking, viscous water, oily-black and purple and clinging, and he felt Keith struggling, choking, and yet still pressing forward into it willingly as if he thought he might be able to reach Shiro. Lance felt him falter, temper stripped away, confidence stripped away, years and years of armor and indifference and defensive hostility stripped away until something raw and flinching was revealed. There were things washing through the bond Lance had never, ever wanted to know-- how young Keith had been, the vigil he kept for a year by himself in the desert, the shy attraction of an awkward schoolboy to an older cadet that smiled at him, the raw uncomplicated joy of flight. Hurricane debris made out of memories. 

Water churned and flowed around Lance’s knees, little wavelets surging higher. Something warm brushed his hand and he looked down to discover a tiny glowing globe bobbing on the surface, images flickering over its curved surface. A bit of floating memory that belonged to Keith, of the first battle they’d all won together. The fragile thought that finally, finally, he was wanted for something worthy. 

He snatched it up without knowing what he was doing and cradled it to his chest like a candle, sheltering its faint warmth. Keith was cold and still, no longer struggling with all of his reasons to fight washed away. His waning fire contracted into a single, diamond bright spark of emotion and memory-- a child’s terror of abandonment. Shiro’s back, leaving him for the Kerberos mission. 

**He is here,** Zarkon’s voice promised, soothing and immense and awful. **He is waiting for you.**

The paralyzing fear Keith had been projecting over the link was draining away. In its place slowly welled a terrible, intoxicating compulsion, a promise of strength and devotion and all of it flavored like Shiro, somehow, the steady commanding presence of the Black Paladin drawing in his destined right hand. It was Shiro’s smile and Shiro’s quiet strength and Shiro’s mouth, warm against the cold, and Keith fractured in the face of it, a sudden surge of delirious, hysterical joy flooding through the bond. He spread his arms and opened his mouth and his legs and the water rushed in greedily to occupy all the spaces that had been hollowed out, filling him to the brim, pressing and stretching against the shape of his insides until there was no room for anything else.

 **Now come to me.**

When the Red Lion opened her jaws, Lance felt the absolute certainty in Keith’s scoured, pleasure-dazed mind that he wasn’t ejecting into Zarkon’s arms, but into Shiro’s. 

And the water was still rising. It reached up to Lance’s thighs now, cold and black and pulling at him, pulling things _out_ of him. _Lethe,_ he thought hysterically, and then couldn’t remember what that meant. The current was tugging him one way so he turned and struggled against it, one arm wrapped across his chest to hold the piece of memory he’d rescued. He didn’t want to forget, he didn’t want to get stuck in this awful fucking place, Hunk and Pidge and Allura were still out there, he just needed to find a way back to Blue, she wouldn’t let him be taken. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

bleep bloop

Slowly, too slowly, there came the sound of some systems sullenly booting back up. The dull glow of the emergency lights kicked in, painting the cockpit in an ominous red wash.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

there is old shit down here don’t look

 

Zarkon had retaken the Black Lion from a grateful, prostrate Shiro, sobbing with gratitude over the burden lifted from him, and now restored to his place as champion of the arena and favored concubine of the Emperor. 

Lance remembered the beginning of that battle only hazily. It was the first time they’d faced Zarkon in person, foolishly thinking themselves liberators or rebels and blindly listening to the Altean princess and her grudge. What he did remember with absolute clarity was the sudden overwhelming presence of Zarkon’s mind inside the lion bond for the first time, how it had reached out first to the Black Lion and then to the Red and then Blue. 

 

 

And then it had come for him. The Red and Black Paladins waiting expectantly for him, pulling at him like a tide and whispering how much they needed him, how much they’d always needed him, how happy they would be together, and it wasn’t like drowning so much as it was sinking into warm water, everything gently pouring into him until there was no room for anything else. The paralyzing terror fell away from him. All the reasons he used to have to hate the Galra, to fight this battle, suddenly seemed distant and unimportant, and he felt Blue’s weapon systems powering down around him as he shivered with needy desire, his thighs spread wide in the command chair. Keith and Shiro were there with him in the dark, somehow, their happiness and pleasure cresting over him and carrying him along to where he needed to be, and he’d heard himself moaning ‘yes, oh god, yes, _please_ ’ in the silence of his cockpit where he’d shut the comms off. 

His next conscious memory was being aboard Zarkon’s flagship in some kind of private room, a group of black-robed druids clustered around the perimeter as Zarkon-- the Black Paladin-- stood over their kneeling forms, looking down at them approvingly. His helmet had been removed and he remembered closing his eyes in pleasure as clawed fingers sifted through his hair and pressed against his lips, exploring his new acquisition. He remembered Zarkon’s voice directly in his mind, soothing away all the hurts and doubts and fears, amplified by the contact and proximity to something that had made the connection through their lions seem a faint echo. It felt so good he’d been crying silently before the end, wiped clean of anything but the desire to be here with his fellow paladins and please their leader. He’d finally shuddered his way to a filthy, embarrassing orgasm inside his uniform when the Emperor allowed him the liberty of kissing his armored boot. 

 

Shiro came back to himself first, the blank lust draining from his face and slowly replaced by panic as he realized where they were. All of them had been brought to the baths, a huge luxurious chamber done in white and purple tiling that wouldn’t have looked out of place in some decadent royal setting. Lance had no memory of the journey there, or when he had been stripped out of his uniform and given a thin silver collar and silver gauntlets that could have doubled as manacles if they’d been attached to anything. All he knew was that he was cold and alone and a little afraid without Zarkon’s confidence buoying him, and he clung to Keith, equally collared, naked and uncertain. Shiro had not only been collared but muzzled as well, leashed with a thick chain to a great iron ring set in the floor that kept him down on his knees. His manacles were chained to the wall behind him, keeping his arms down at his sides and slightly behind him. Something small and silver had been placed over his groin as well, and Lance realized with slow, blank astonishment that it was some kind of cock cage. He’d never seen one before in person.

“No, no, no no no.” Shiro’s chest was heaving rapidly as he tested his bonds, straining forward futilely, and then started throwing himself against them desperately, rattling the chain. “Not again, please God, not again, I can’t--” He trailed off into a moan, dropping his head almost to his knees and clutching at his hair. His panic hammered at the fragile mental link Keith and Lance were trying to sustain by pressing together as close as they could. He felt like something alien and almost horrifying, dragging his black oily emotions over a barred door. He wanted in not because he recognized them or wanted the comfort or safety of the connection, he wanted to drag them out with him into the tar pit of rage and terror, to drown them along with him-- 

Keith, braver or just more suicidal, stiffened slightly and took an uncertain step towards Shiro, his intent clear to try and bring him into the bond anyway to calm him down, only to stop when Shiro bared his teeth at the approach, eyes wild and unseeing. 

“I’ll kill you,” he promised, his voice low and thick and nearly unrecognizable. “Skittering around in my head. I know you. I _know you._ ” This time when he threw his weight against the chains some of the tiles cracked, and Keith shrank back against Lance. They had been told to stay here, to wait until someone came for them, and the suggestion stayed with them like a strict order. They could no more run for the door than they could breathe in the vacuum of space. 

Fortunately the chains held fast, and after a few more attempts Shiro stopped struggling, his labored breathing loud in the echoing chamber. 

Keith let out a breath and approached him again, towing Lance along with him. The air in the chamber was warm and humid but all three of them were still shivering, and Keith’s shaky fingers rattled the chain as he inspected it, making Shiro flinch, which made them all flinch. He didn’t look up from the tiled floor, even when Keith gave up looking for any place to unlock the chain and bravely settled down against him, pressing against his side. Lance didn’t want to let go of Keith at all, afraid the last tenuous connection between them would snap and leave him alone in his own head, but he kept hold of Keith’s hand and sat down on Shiro’s other side. Shiro let out a noise that sounded like a sob when they did.

“Keith.” Maybe Shiro _was_ crying, for how broken he sounded. He was still hunched over himself, staring at the floor. “Lance. You two need to run. You need to get out, please.” 

“He told us not to leave,” Keith responded slowly, his voice a little foggy like he was having trouble remembering the right words. Lance nodded along with him, forgetting that Shiro wasn’t looking and wouldn’t see.

“ _Please._ You can’t listen to him, you have to--” Shiro sucked in a breath like it hurt him. “I’m your commander. I’m the Black Paladin, and I’m ordering you both to get out of here. Don’t go for the lions, just find the nearest escape pod and get away.”

The fear was back, battering at their minds, and for a second Lance felt an awful moment of disorientation-- why the hell was he naked, why wasn’t he in his lion, what was going on, why was Shiro in _chains,_ jesus christ-- but Keith squeezed his hand and pushed a wave of love and resignation and stubbornness that hurt to feel over both of them, and he knew abruptly that he wouldn’t be able to leave Keith, the same way Keith wouldn’t be able to leave Shiro. 

“I’m not leaving you again,” Keith whispered, shoving his face against Shiro’s shoulder. “I don’t care what happens. I stay with you.”

“He’ll destroy you,” Shiro said, voice raw, and they all three looked up when the door slid open. 

 

 

 

 

 

2\. Change

waugh

Lance gasped for air, each breath a sob around the thick leather bite strap as the overwhelming power of quintessence slid under his skin, making him jerk at the restraints that kept his wrists, ankles, waist, and chest strapped down to the table. No expense had been spared for the comfort of Zarkon’s prizes, so the restraints were all of a soft, foam-like material that held him in place but didn’t abrade his skin, and the surface of the table was made from the same, painstakingly contoured to his body. His back arched helplessly against the give of the foam, muscles contracting as energy flowed through them. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes as energy skittered over his body but he didn’t scream, he screwed his eyes tightly closed and held on to the memory of the last time the Emperor had touched him, powerful claws delicately tracing his fragile human skin and promising that the pain from the druids’ experiments would soon fall away and leave him stronger, more fit to be one of the Empire’s new paladins and more pleasing to Zarkon himself, which was secretly his greatest motivator. In close proximity Zarkon’s mental presence was like a physical thing, as powerful and tangible as hot sunlight warming his skin. When Zarkon enveloped him in his will he took away all the fear Lance used to feel, the shame and the doubt and all of the unnecessary things that had once plagued him. Zarkon had rescued him from what he used to be. 

waugh

Another wave of purple energy rippled over him and he gasped out loud, straining at his bonds. There was a burning sensation pooling in the pit of his stomach and lower down, with the faintest trace tingling from his mouth all the way down his throat. All of the places Zarkon had filled him with quintessence-infused seed, deliberately to spur this interaction. He groaned and panted as the sensations swept through him. His body had been slower to change than the others but he was determined to catch up, begging Zarkon for more seed whenever the busy Emperor had a free moment to indulge. Lance didn’t mind being fucked during council meetings, although others complained that the indulgence led the Emperor’s attention to wander with one or another paladin always writhing in his lap on the throne or nursing his thick reptilian hemipenes beneath the war table. Zarkon was tolerant of their neediness, especially Lance’s, and spoke approvingly of his initiative in trying to please his master. Lance’s belly was already starting to round out with how much come he carried in it on session days, stretching the skintight Galra version of the paladin uniform. Soon, he reminded himself dreamily, it would swell even further when he’d finally absorbed enough refined quintessence and his body had adapted enough to nurture Zarkon’s young inside him. He was determined to have that honor first.

Not that it mattered much, he knew. The Emperor was tolerant of Keith and Lance’s rivalry but he almost always treated them as a pair, and it was likely that he would impregnate them both at the same time. Their first time had been together, both of them squirming and terrified and exhilarated. It seemed ridiculous now that they’d been afraid, but they had been so naive and so, so desperate for connection, clinging to each other and trembling when the Emperor had left them briefly to give orders to his armada and taken his strong, comforting mental presence away.

 

 

 

SCRAPS SCRAPS SCRAPS

The chamber that held the quintessence baths, facilities available only to favorites of the Emperor on select capital ships, was nearly half as large as the lion hangar, with high arched ceilings and intricate gold and violet patterns set among the gleaming black tiles. The baths themselves were massive rectangles sunken into the floor with a set of steps leading down into them, the gold edging of the steps disappearing down into the black, gently frothing waters. Such opulence would have seemed absurd for something built only to cater to one or two individuals on a capital ship that carried thousands, but Chele had seen the harem baths aboard Zarkon’s flagship _Dreadnought_ and knew these to be on a much smaller scale. Subcommander Thace had even apologized for their “economy” when he had first welcomed the Red and Blue Paladins aboard the _Sorrowful Enduring._

The baths were much more efficient than any healing pod, even if they did have an alarming tendency to fill his head full of wisps of thoughts or images that didn’t necessarily belong to him. Even diluted quintessence made him sensitive, needy, and snappish, and he staggered his way over to Riva’s bath with a snarl at the medtechs that tried to coax him away. He sat down on the lip of the rectangular sunken tub and fished in the dark violet liquid for Riva’s hand, mindful of the tubes plugged into the ports along his forearm and raising it from the bath to lace their fingers together. Riva breathed calmly and steadily under the oxygen mask, but Chele thought he felt some flicker of recognition deep in his head where the lion bond connected them.

Neither of their injuries were truly serious. The mission had been a simple one, quelling rebels in a system full of free-floating asteroid mines, and the Emperor felt it a matter of appearances to send his two paladins along with an appropriate military force from Commander Prorok’s fleet to prove their loyalty to the Empire. Riva and Chele were not, of course, official members of the Imperial army and had not yet been put through regular training; they were both still in the middle of their extensive conditioning at the Druids’ hands and many of the Galra commanders remained uncertain of them for that alone. Prorok would have been happy to have his request refused so he might complain of it to his fellow officers. As it had been granted, he was still keen to see them fail or act disobediently, also that he might carry tales back to the terrifying military gossip network. 

He was disappointed in that ambition, however. Not two days into their journey through the asteroid fields the _Enduring_ was ambushed by rebels, and a series of massive explosions along her flank damaged several hangars and knocked out her jump drives. The lions had never even been deployed; Chele and Riva suffered smoke inhalation and fractures from the ship’s gravity stuttering, injuries shared by more than a quarter of the crew although they were the only two so fussed over for it. The _Enduring_ was drifting through space now, waiting for repairs; a trio of frigates and a light cruiser monitored the perimeter in case of any further attacks. 

Thace had quietly suggested that perhaps the paladins might like to join the perimeter escort once they had recovered sufficiently, if only to give the illusion that they were accomplishing something out here. Chele didn’t know why a Subcommander should be so accommodating to outsiders like them when his superior officer was a regular and vocal opponent of Haggar at the war table, but there was no good reason to refuse. There were already enough rumors about the fickle nature of the Voltron lions and their pilots. Red and Blue had grown contrary, sometimes acting independently and sometimes refusing to move at all, and didn’t seem to like being separated from the Black Lion and her paladin; a sentiment shared by their pilots, who had at first been reluctant to take a mission so far away to the edges of settled Galra space. 

The various fleet commanders muttered darkly about paladins and lions that could only function when Zarkon held their reins directly, despite Haggar’s repeated assurances to all of them that the conditioning and the quintessence experiments would soon resolve everything-- keeping it a secret that the Red and Blue Paladins were plagued by night terrors and scraps of memories from the great dark space of their lives before they’d been rescued by Zarkon, and grew unreasonably anxious without his steadying presence through the lion bond. Trying to pilot a Voltron lion that could sense when you had no business attempting to fly a mission was near impossible, and also their fragile bodies still sometimes reacted negatively to quintessence, rather than accepting the changes that were to make them faster, stronger, and more capable. The first experimental infusion attempts had made them desperately ill before trial and error had modified the dosages; Chele barely remembered his earliest days back on the flagship at all, save as a series of disjointed impressions. 

Chele’s body in particular wasn’t acclimatizing quickly. He still had very little of the Galra language (though he could read their writing well enough), while Riva was by now able to painstakingly pick through slow conversations. Haggar’s Druids and the personal attendants assigned to them spoke the basic universal language around them, but many of the military commanders considered it a point of contention that Zarkon’s prized paladins could not speak the Galra language, had no natural claws or armor, were smaller and weaker than virtually all other conscripted species, had no formalized military training that the Empire would recognize, and had only barely reached sexual maturity. 

That they both shared the Emperor’s bed more regularly than any concubine was dismissed; neither of them had had _children,_ and their genetic material was still in the process of being manipulated to be worthy of a Galra bloodline, as the Empire accepted only the strongest and most powerful contributors to their future generations. There had been no other paladins for ten thousand years, which made Chele and Riva ill-fitting pieces in the otherwise well-oiled Imperial war machine. At the bottom of the social hierarchy languished prisoners and slaves, the skilled laborers among them pressed into service where needed and the likely fighters sent off as conscripts to the training camps. Others were given to the mines, or to the arena as fodder for the gruesome pit battles, the lowest of the gladiator spectacles, or to the harems to be trained as bed-slaves or more valued professional concubines or even contracted consorts to high-ranking officials, or to the breeding enclaves where all common Galra litters were consolidated. Slaves were not often bred themselves, as it required several marks of honor before one was permitted to contribute any genetic material to the various levels of Galra eugenic programs, but there was always a need for more caretakers.

Slaves could rise, however, if they were lucky and daring and fierce; there had been any number of gladiators risen from the pit battles to the more honorable dueling entertainments, and famous concubines had made themselves wealthy despite their low origins. A slave that showed enough mettle might be gifted the chance for military service they had initially been passed over for. The life of a conscript was not often any easier, as they were obliged to learn slave forms before they began their combat training and were eligible to be used and abused by higher ranked trainees, but the death rates were not so high as in the slave stables and the prisons. The training camps had quotas to fill that were not served by half their potentials dying off from sickness or starvation. Citizen volunteers born of the breeding enclaves were not subjected to the same humiliations, and some officers came into the ranks at a high position from the start without ever having set foot in a training camp. From there regular military training further funneled trainees into more specialized roles. Ambition, aggression, sexual virility and combat ferocity were all prized, and duels and political backstabbing were common.

As Keith and Lance were some strange cross between raw conscripts, highly favored personal concubines of the Emperor, and irreplaceable military assets that nevertheless had no official standing with the military, it was no surprise that many of the Galra had no idea how to treat them. The medtechs hovering impatiently in the background of the chamber did not quite dare to order Lance out, but gave way eagerly when a Druid appeared to lay a clawed hand on his bare shoulder, stroking his skin knowingly. 

“Come away, Paladin Chele,” the Druid commanded, using the Galra form of Blue’s name. “He will be sent to you when he awakens, and you are late for your session. You will only feel worse if you are not attended.”

Still dripping with quintessence, Lance could feel the smooth walls of the shields that protected the Druid’s thoughts along with the nervous energy of the medtechs further away. He was making them uncomfortable with his projecting, and his body did ache for for the release it had been trained to crave. His skin felt feverish and ill-fitting, his nipples swollen, likely to chafe against even the sheerest covering of fabric, and his cock was a heavy, throbbing weight between his legs, unruly outside of the cage he normally would’ve been wearing during active duty. His hole twitched impatiently, empty and unsatisfied as he was reminded of what he was missing. Lance had sessions with the Druids twice or even three times a day unless interrupted by other duties, while Keith, who tolerated the quintessence infusions much better, needed only one session per day and could often get by with training toys or with the attentions of a slave. Lance was a greedier subject, much to Haggar’s annoyance; humans were quite insatiable compared to other species in her experiments.

Of course the Emperor was the only one who could truly satisfy them now that their bodies had adapted enough to accommodate him; quintessence was such a part of him that his seed glowed with it and left the effect of a faint chemical burn on unconditioned flesh. Concubines not strong enough to tolerate his physical and psychic attentions had been left shivering and near mindless in his wake, needing days of recovery before they could be presented again. Being mounted by him was overwhelming in all possible ways. But the paladins craved it; Zarkon had tended them personally and very gently during the first days of their conditioning, enough to acclimate and soothe them so they could go on to the Druids’ care, but of course he was too busy to always be with them. The Galra Empire did not run itself. 

Lance didn’t want a Druid substitute, or the machines, even though he knew it would calm him down immediately once he had something thick in his mouth to suckle while he was fucked and milked. He wanted Zarkon and he wanted Keith and he could have neither of them, and he shrugged off the Druid’s hand in a fit of contrariness. 

“I don’t need it,” he said militantly in formal Galra, deliberately mangling the pronunciation just to make everyone in the room wince. “I am going to the lion bay.”

The Druid did not try to touch him again as he snatched up his heavy, sapphire studded metal collar and locked it in place around his throat, the filmy blue and white silks threaded from it falling loosely around his body in only the barest nod to modesty. The thought of his full uniform was stifling and unbearable. It was indecent even among slaves to go walking the decks without a cage or other restraint holding his straining penis, but he was not a slave and no one would stop him. 

“Grand Mistress Haggar will hear of this,” the Druid said, standing out of his way.

“Haggar is not _my_ mistress, and is not here.” Lance paused at the doorway, pretending it was not dizziness that made him put a hand out to the wall. “You can tell Thace and Prorok all about it, if you want, I’m sure they’d be happy to hear about how you’re crap at your job.” 

The last he said in English, and if his words were not understood his tone was very plain. He stalked out into the hallway and headed for the lion deck, scowling at the looks of the other soldiers, who all gave him room. Their thoughts were all very loud and he was unhappily anticipating awful quintessence dreams later, the kind that brought him awake screaming or sobbing without the Black Paladin around to gently suppress them. He didn’t want to think about the buried memories and how much they bothered him, how much they made him doubt himself. Even looking at Keith’s serene face in the quintessence bath, pale and floating amidst the violet-black liquid, had made his heart beat harder, some stress reaction to an incident he didn’t remember, and even the feeling of being knocked off his feet by an explosion was horribly, achingly familiar. 

He had apparently gasped out Sendak’s name upon being roused, although why he should have thought of the disgraced commander, now an arena gladiator, he had no idea. He had seen Sendak fight only a handful of times aboard the _Dreadnought_ and the alien had smirked at him once, apparently amused by the sight of him curled jealously in the Emperor’s lap. 

The lion bay was an entire hangar reserved for Red and Blue, it was a huge, echoing space that seemed strange and deserted without a small army of technicians scurrying about and calling to each other as they worked. Blue had already risen to her feet, perhaps alerted by his emotions, and he ran the rest of the way to her since there was no one to see, lifting his hands to receive her enormous muzzle as she bent down to him, caressing. He had the strange intrusive thought that once he’d believed the lions were like regular ships, stationary until activated, which was ridiculous. He’d seen Black respond to Zarkon in the same way, like a living creature; she was the only one of the three who had done so from the beginning. 

Blue crooned to him wordlessly, querying. 

“I’m all right,” he whispered in English, draping himself almost full body across her nose with his arms spread wide, heedless of the cold soaking through his skin. It was grounding, drowning out some of his body’s clamoring physical needs. “Keith’s all right, too.”

Red, who had not moved from her lazy recline but kept both of them within her eyeline, twitched a tail tip tellingly. She was inclined to be sullen, having taken Black’s absence harder. Lance felt the same way. He _wanted_ his leader and fellow paladin with an almost painful, gnawing yearning. Zarkon’s presence took away all the fear and doubt he felt and filled him with certainty. Being without him was like a kind of withdrawal. 

“I don’t even know why Prorok asked for us. There’s a million other cakewalk training missions we could be doing that aren’t out in the middle of nowhere.” Politics were not Lance’s specialty, although Keith was even worse at unraveling knots of intention and veiled insults, but he knew bullshit when it was going on under his nose. There was no reason for them to be here, stuck on a dead-in-the-water ship, except as an excuse to pull them away from Zarkon-- 

The entry door to the hangar slid open. Lance looked over crossly, and felt all the breath leave his lungs.

There was no reason for the reaction. The figure pacing patiently towards him was human, young, perhaps a couple years older than Lance himself, with attractively tousled honey-brown hair and eyes the color of warm topaz, dressed in the clinging garments of a concubine. If he had possessed physical flaws at one time they had been removed during the conditioning process; the body under those draping fabrics was lithe and supple and moved with a certain inhuman grace that Lance automatically associated with high level concubines. 

Lance had never seen him before in his life. He was sure of that, and yet Blue had drawn her head back, yellow eyes following the stranger’s every movement. 

“Honored Paladin?” The concubine spoke in soft, formal Galra, slow enough for Lance to understand without seeming like he was patronizing. “Thace informed me that you and your companion might need my services during your stay here.”

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	5. Shatter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The EVA AU. Sort of.

It takes Keith two weeks to admit that there’s nothing in the debris fields except debris. He knows, he _knows_ that Shiro didn’t eject during the battle, that he wasn’t torn from his cockpit, because he was there with them in the lion bond right up until the second that he wasn’t, but Keith still takes Red out every day, flying grid patterns to make sure he covers every inch of territory. He stares at the screens until his vision swims, his fingers clenched and aching around the controls of his lion. 

He hurts without reason. Red draws blood and quintessence from him to power her thrumming engines and she’s a greedy thing, too eager to drink from him, but he feels like a raw amateur all over again, exhausted from the shortest sessions with her. His muscles complain, his suit pulls over the raw skin near his ports where the umbilical cords attach. Even when he removes his helmet in the quintessence flooded cockpit, drawing the oxygenated liquid into his lungs, his eyes still feel dry and bruised. The quintessence is blood-warm but he shivers, aching. 

The hollow wreckage of derelict cruisers drift past him, icebergs in a sea of smaller debris, and every time he sees the floating, broken body of a sentry silhouetted on his scanners his stomach contracts. There are dozens of them, maybe hundreds, spilling from the gaping wounds in carrier ships like droplets of blood leaking from a wound in zero-g, coagulating in little clusters of reaching, stiffened limbs. 

Most of them are easily identifiable as non-organic, Red’s sensors filtering them out as nothing of interest, but not all of the floating, silent figures are robots. Those, Keith has to check manually, kneeling in the maw of his lion’s mouth and catching each corpse as it drifts by, the lights of his suit reflecting off the ice coating them. Liquid quintessence freezes and thaws on his armor every time he goes back and forth from the cockpit. 

They don’t feel like bodies. They are hard, inanimate. Their hands are brittle claws. As much as he’s tried to prepare himself for this, as much as he’s told himself he won’t be the one to react like a child, Keith is grateful that the cold of deep space has frozen them over, hiding the worst of the details. He can’t see their faces except as shadows, dark pits under the ice. 

Victory or death. He knows more than he ever wanted to about all the ways you can die in space. He’d made himself sick with it, the first time Shiro was lost. It feels like a million years ago, now. He’d stood in the desert dust, freshly expelled, feeling the sun beat down on him, pressing its radiation into his skin, and thought about a slow, horrifying freeze. He knew there was no way to understand, with his boots planted firmly on a planet that cradled fragile human life, with an atmosphere protecting him and oxygen in his lungs. 

He knew that it was likely to be quick, but it might not be. It might be a slow leak. A small malfunction. A stretch of several minutes where death closed in at a leisurely pace, uncaring. There might be plenty of time to suffer. 

The other paladins flew with him for the first couple of days, their silence conspicuous on the main audio channel. In shock, or in denial, still, following along blindly afer Keith when he’d leave a room and head to the launch bays because they were used to following. Maybe they have private channels open to each other. Maybe they talk about him, talk about the futility of doing this. He’s sure nobody wants to say it to his face. Hunk had been the first to dig in his heels about handling the corpses, his old motion sickness flaring up again with a vengeance. 

Keith doesn’t think it’s motion sickness, given how slow and methodically they’re flying the search patterns. It’s just regular human sensibilities being violated. Human decency, whatever that is. He supposes he has an excuse now, to not have something like that. 

Except Pidge is right there with him, fully human and so furious he sometimes feels like he can see the air vibrating around her. A disappearance without logic, without data, is a personal insult to her, a bloody re-opening of every scar Kerberos ever gave her, and she tells Keith flatly that she doesn’t give a shit about handling frozen, deconstructed meat any more than she minds taking apart a functioning robot. 

She might be lying. Keith knows one of his worst qualities is his own stubbornness, his inability to care about the things that other people-- people that aren’t Shiro, people that have their own agendas, people that might be lying to him-- tell him he ought to care about, but Pidge is a million times worse than him. The only person who can tell Pidge she’s wrong about something is Pidge, and only after she’s proven it to her own exacting satisfaction, probably with graphs and equations. That’s the only authority she believes in, without Shiro, without her father, without her brother. Maybe she would listen to Allura, but Allura lived through a war of paladins, corrupt or otherwise, and she’s not the species of hypocrite to try and tell them that Voltron paladins are somehow exempt from violence, that peacekeepers don’t have to carry guns. 

If Pidge wants to handle the dead bodies she had a hand in creating, Keith isn’t going to stop her. Lance and Hunk can try.

(They do. They fail, until Hunk appeals to her great weakness: doing these things manually is too slow, too inefficient. They need better sensors, specialized equipment. They need machines and programming for this.)

Lance is the one who really makes an effort to keep up with him, even though Blue is too large for the precision flying Keith has to do when checking a cramped nexus of wrecked ships. He quips in front of the others that he can do anything Keith can do, but once they’re out there he’s silent, his breathing soft and uneven in Keith’s ear over the comms. He knows better than to try and get Keith to talk, but sometimes he’ll start speaking quietly about Shiro like he knows him, like he thinks he’s saying something that Keith needs to hear.

Shiro would have done this for us. Shiro wouldn’t leave anyone behind. He knows we’re searching for him. He knows we won’t give up. 

Keith doesn’t tell him to shut the fuck up, or to stop pushing himself like is some kind of contest. He doesn’t need to. Lance hits his breaking point all on his own, when a choked off noise comes over the comms and Blue’s great jaws abruptly slam shut, closing between her captain and the horrible frozen thing that had been drifting towards them. Her deafening growl echoes inside Keith’s mind and in his helmet as she breaks from the flight pattern and carries Lance back to the castle ship, claws extended, her armor plates bristling and her tail lashing, its cannon charged and humming ominously. She passes Red on the way in, golden eyes tracking them, and Keith is made suddenly aware of how much larger the Blue Lion is as her great shadow falls across them. 

He doesn’t twitch a finger on the sticks. If Red had made a move towards her, Keith thinks she might have fired on them. 

Hours later, after Keith is finished with both his search pattern and Lance’s, he drags himself past the common room and sees Lance and Hunk tangled together on the couch, Lance still in his armor, pinkish smears of quintessence dried in streaks around the spinal ports, huddling under a blanket. His helmet sits on the ground on its side, like it was torn off and thrown. Neither of them look up at the sound of Keith’s footsteps, but he’s sure they notice that he takes the wrong hallway, heading to his quarters. 

He left his armor a messy wreck on the hangar floor, a problem for future-Keith. His undersuit is damp with sweat and quintessence from Red’s cockpit, and tacky with the blood she’d 

 

Pidge throws herself into the equipment problem and loads Green down with so much equipment she looks like some kind of pack animal, draped with wires and satellites, and Pidge’s arms are covered with spark burns from where she feverishly cobbled it together out of scraps, not speaking except to trade incomprehensible technical dialogue with Hunk, who was welding as fast as he could. Pidge swears that Green’s sensors are so amplified now she would be able to find an individual living microbe floating out among the dust and the rocks and the shards of metal wreckage.

Keith absolutely believes her. But he checks the bodies anyway. Allura helps him from one of the castle’s shuttles, grim-faced and silent. She is not new to this sort of work. 

This is what he wasn’t able to do at Kerberos. There’d been no possibility of a search, of course; the time it would take for a round trip flight to the edge of the galaxy, the expense of it, there was simply no question. Garrison wasn’t going to send anyone else until they had another research expedition ready, and public opinion had forgotten. It would be years. 

And there wouldn’t be anything to find. The planet surface likely wouldn’t have changed. If he could walk on the surface, if he could teleport himself there through sheer will, he might see abandoned equipment. He might see footprints, preserved and frozen. It wouldn’t tell him the story of what happened. It would just be the last place that Takashi Shirogane had allegedly been alive, a million million miles away from where he should have been, which was any place Keith could keep him within arm’s reach. 

It’s happened again, a little voice inside him whispers. It’s happened again, and this time while Shiro was inside Keith’s mind, while he was safely protected inside the universe’s strongest weapon, with Keith at his right hand and the whole team right there, and he’d still--

There is nothing here. Keith feels it in the empty space between his ribs, the thing that aches faintly with every breath he takes. Pidge accumulates graphs and charts and data points she requires to make it real for her, to get her past the raw fury of another senseless, impenetrable mystery. By the time she’s willing to believe she’s telling him what he already knows. There is nothing living in the debris field. 

Shiro is gone.

“Check it _again,_ ” he hears himself snap. It’s not what he should say, not what he should do, but it’s like a scripted act that he has to go through with: Keith loses his temper. Keith can’t control his reactions. Keith always says the wrong things, doesn’t think before he acts. Keith doesn’t care about the team, except for Shiro. 

Pidge doesn’t bat an eyelash at him, of course. Pidge could make him squirm like a worm on a hook if she ever felt like really lashing out, and she is calm and cool now after having already exhausted her temper on the data and its collection. She looks at him and he knows what she’s looking at. She’s carrying scars, but he’s got a knife in his stomach, actively twisting it. He doesn’t know how to turn it into something productive, something that’s not knee-jerk anger and rebellion and resentment. He got in his lion and flew, gave his blood to power her engines until he was gray and shaking, like that was going to help. 

(Do Galra feel loss the way that humans do? Do they grieve the same way? Are all Galra useless in the face of emotional situations, or is it just Keith?)

Pidge doesn’t deserve be snapped at and Lance feels the need to pile in and tell him so, like Pidge isn’t capable of defending herself, and Hunk wrings his hands at all of them, and Allura looks at him with such pity that he can’t stand to be in the same room with them anymore. He spins on his heel while Lance is mid-word, leaving him ranting at his back. 

He can almost hear Shiro’s voice in his ear, echoing. Sighing. _You can’t run away from this, Keith._

The Black Lion is an immobile lump on the hangar floor, slumped and lifeless. Keith stands in the doorway, not daring to set foot inside. He doesn’t want to see her eyes light up gold for him. He doesn’t want to hear the whir of her mechanics, the thrumming purr of her engines starting for him, trying to invite him in. He had spent that entire night next to the campfire on the geyser planet, Shiro’s head pillowed on his lap as his fever spiked and his breathing rasped, moaning faintly every time the wound pulled, and he had felt, really felt, Black’s presence for the first time, the way Shiro must feel it, like a weight draped across his entire body. 

Piloting Black was nothing like piloting Red, who shoved her adaptor cables rudely into place along his suit’s spinal ports even before the cockpit had finished filling with blood-tinged quintessence. Black was more willing to wait until he was fully submerged and had taken his first breath in the oxygenated liquid before her cables attached, and she had more of them than any of the other lions. She plugged in along his spine, his shoulders, his legs, and even into his helmet, surrounding him in a forest of wiring, and her spinal cables were at least twice as thick as Red’s. Syncing with her was not like being swallowed up by a flame, but like being drawn into a gravity well, entire starfields expanding out before him. She was breathlessly, terrifyingly strong. 

Sitting by the campfire with Shiro, it was the first time he’d ever felt like she was really looking _at_ him, aware of him outside of the connection when they formed Voltron. Weighing him, maybe. She lay there like a sphinx, unmoving and deadly, her eyes dim, but not asleep, watching him watch her. Watching him hunch protectively over her paladin, whose blood fueled her engines and her weapons and all her systems. There was no protecting Shiro from the things he chose to do to himself, from the things he chose to give himself to. 

Black was older than Red, and darker in a way that scared Keith a little bit, now that he’d let her drink, now that he’d given something of himself to her. She could exert her will on all the other lions the same way Shiro automatically brought all the paladins in line. She loved them, but she had also defeated them in combat before, chained to her paladin’s overwhelming desire to bring them all together under his command. She’d hurt them on his orders. She’d let her paladin murder theirs. There was still something of Zarkon inside her, the same way there was still something of the previous Red Paladin inside of Keith’s lion. Whispers of inclination. Some small bit of leftover blood and quintessence, even after ten thousand years. 

He had bent further over Shiro, replacing the cool cloth on his forehead, and tried to ignore the sudden gravity of her presence inside his mind. Red was annoyed but not helpful, more irritated by the fact that Keith had been in a battle and she hadn’t. He could still feel Red’s claim on him, the sense of rightness in their partnership, the shared blood that coursed through her cables every time he plugged in, but he knew that the Black Lion would overwhelm her in a heartbeat. 

And he might go willingly. There was something of Shiro inside of Black, too, something that called to the angry, bitter child he’d been and soothed him the same way Shiro’s hand on his shoulder grounded him and Shiro’s voice in his ear kept him present. When the cables attach, they take their pilot’s blood and circulate it into the lion’s own quintessence filled veins, mixing them together. Black would bite deep and swallow him like an ocean, and he would be comforted by it. 

Shiro wants this for him, and it is hard, harder than he’d thought possible, to deny the instinct to please him. All Keith can do is dig in his heels and use his selfish, helpless fury like a shield, blaring his emotions back along that fragile, tenuous link: no, he doesn’t want to make Shiro proud, no he doesn’t want to take Shiro’s place or follow in his footsteps or any of that bullshit, he just _wants Shiro._

Allura is the one who bows her head over Black’s great muzzle and meditates while Keith watches like a coward from the doorway. She is trying to commune with the lion to find out what happened in those last moments. They had all been there, inside the mindlink of Voltron, but none of them had been in that cockpit. Black has to know what went wrong. 

“It’s not that she is refusing to answer.” Allura’s voice is soft, exhausted. She is looking at the lion the way she looks at the room where her father’s AI used to appear. “She is refusing to wake at all. She is not damaged in any way that I can tell, but it’s as if she’s drawn into herself for healing, or as if she were waiting for a paladin. I cannot reach her like this.”

Waiting for a new paladin. Keith nods jerkily, not trusting himself to speak, and thinks again about launching himself over that cliff with the speeder, the shaky wobbly sick feeling in his stomach the last time he’d sent Red straight towards a barrage of laser fire. A second’s decision would take him into the hangar, right up to Black’s jaws. He could cable in himself, bring her back to life with a gift of blood. If he could get her to answer even one question about what happened to Shiro, it would be worth it, wouldn’t it?

He makes reckless decisions all the time. He shouldn’t be terrified of this one. 

“Keith.”

He flinches. Allura has turned to face him, and he can see the exhaustion in every line of her body, the sorrow sitting like a mask over her face. 

“This is not the end for us,” she says, quietly, but not gently. He is starting to believe there’s no gentleness left in her, or that she’s simply stopped using it on him, now that he’s Galra. Now that Shiro’s gone.

“The universe needs Voltron and the paladins.” Her hand rests delicately on the Black Lion’s muzzle; the lions are hers, he remembers, the lions are hers in a way they’ll never belong to a ragtag bunch of humans from a nowhere planet that’s barely achieved spaceflight. Allura hand-picked them for each lion, except Blue, who had already made her own choice. “We cannot stop here-- we aren’t going to be allowed to stop here, not by the Galra, or by our allies. You understand that, don’t you? We are _needed._ Voltron is needed.”

This is what she’s not saying, what she’s not demanding of him: did he only become a paladin because of Shiro, because it was where Shiro was going? Had he ever stopped to think that one day Shiro might be gone, and Keith had pledged himself to a cause, to a team of strangers?

 

 

 

Without the Black Lion they can’t form Voltron. Without Shiro they can’t function at all. They’d been more in sync during that last battle than they ever had before, but now Keith can feel the others like sunlight on his skin, the worried looks that Lance gives him when his back is turned, the constant press of anxiety and concern from Hunk, the sharp, angry, crystalline hurt that Pidge keeps between her lungs. It should have been easier, better, to have a stronger connection, but they’re horribly out of balance now. There is no underlying confidence to bolster them, no pride in their accomplishments, no calm, collected role model. Shiro had been holding all of them up in different ways, and Keith had known it, because he was the only one that got to see Shiro when he was tired and cracked open, nightmare-haunted, doggedly pacing the hallways of the castle after all of them had fallen asleep just to “check the perimeter one more time,” afraid for them. 

Keith loses his temper. Loses all his grounding, all his focus, everything that used to be steady and solid underneath him crumbling away like sand, leaving him untethered. The others step around him like an exposed landmine and he can _feel_ their hurt at his hurt, and there’s not a goddamn thing he can do about it. Keith can’t hold onto his temper no matter how hard he tries, every tiny incident rubbing against raw nerves, forgetting how words are supposed to work, fucking up their small window of victory that they should be using to cement alliances. He catches Lance crying in the showers, shoulders trembling as he methodically washes his hair, not letting the fact that he’s sobbing get in the way of his task. They’re due for the strategy meeting in fifteen minutes, even though they haven’t been actually talking about strategy at all lately. It’s just the time that Shiro set for them, and they’re all used to scheduling their day around it. 

Lance doesn’t look at him and Keith retreats, cowardly, that awful hot familiar feeling winding up tighter and tighter in his stomach like a burning ember. Allura catches him sneaking out at night and puts her foot down, ordering the hangars sealed to keep him from flying all day and all night, from letting Red drain him dry, greedy and unrestrained. Keith curls up in a ball on Shiro’s empty, perfectly made bed with its hospital corners, dry-eyed, remembering. 

No one came to tell him, at Garrison. He heard it along with everyone else, an official, sanitized announcement about the mission failure, no extra details, no sympathy for the way the world dropped out from underneath him. He’d been in the mess hall, or some other public room, and he’d heard the chatter around him slowly dying, a ripple effect heading towards him, and in the sudden quiet the announcer’s dispassionate voice had come through clear.

Disaster on Kerberos. All crew members lost. Pilot error. Between one heartbeat and the next, Shiro had been alive and then Shiro was dead, a lonely frozen body drifting somewhere out in deep space, unrecoverable, and Keith realized just how fragile all his ideas of the future had been, built on Shiro’s broad shoulders, on his ready smile and the way he never let Keith push him away. 

Keith didn’t want it without him. Graduating Garrison, becoming a star pilot, going into space. He had cared about those things, or maybe he’d learned to care about them because Shiro wanted him to, and then he’d stopped caring violently he had to wonder if he’d ever really wanted them in the first place, or if he’d just allowed Shiro to influence him. 

History repeats. 

It’s happened again, he thinks, repeating it silently. It’s happened again. 

(What else was he expecting? What else could he ever expect?) 

None of them can afford to break down in the middle of a war. There’s no desert to retreat into and lose himself where no one gave a shit and it didn’t matter if he lived or died. He has the others tethered to him like hooks under his flesh, pulling. He can’t bring them down with him. He can’t leave. He can’t let himself implode. 

(If he isn’t human, then that makes him inhuman. He’s capable of more than a human, isn’t he?)

Quintessence bleaches the ends of his hair white and burns in his lungs as Red floods her cockpit day after day for him, her cables snaking around him like cradling arms. She hums with the blood she’s drawn from him, and the metal of her skin is hot to the touch, alive with the energy she drains. He forgets to wear his armor and nearly ruins his jacket, tossing it off to let the cables attach their tiny sucker mouths directly to his skin. They leave small round bruises along his spine and shoulders, almost like lovebites, and he stumbles weak and anemic from her mouth. He doesn’t mind it. When she leaves him empty and exhausted it’s easier to fall into unconsciousness and stay that way. 

Pidge does re-analyze the data, unsleeping without Shiro to boss her into going to bed. Hunk builds equipment for her and stress cooks, afraid and unable to talk about it, the only one of them with enough common sense to have ever been scared of dying in a battle. Lance alternates between getting out of Keith’s way and following him around belligerently, trying to initiate conversations and then not knowing what to say when Keith bothers to respond. 

Coran, somehow the only adult on the ship, now, talks to their allies and bullies the team as much as he can into taking care of themselves. The lions take a toll on their bodies, he lectures again and again, fueling themselves with blood and quintessence and projecting their strength and instincts back to their captains, influencing them for good or ill. Piloting a Voltron lion is about maintaining balance, and Keith partners the most unstable of the five, the one who always drinks a little bit too deeply and leaves him half-fainting in the pilot’s chair, the only one who sees her packmates constantly in the other paladins and pushes, pushes, pushes at him. 

Two weeks in, and Allura finally steps up to stop their (his) free fall. She has to, and Keith knows it the moment he walks into the common area and she locks eyes with him, challenging, and everyone else has their gazes averted to avoid being drawn into the fight. Shiro is their commander but Allura is their general, and she has been indulging Keith, waiting for him and his lion to fall into place in the chain of command. He remembers uncomfortably that the day they met her was the day she found out her father was dead, and she had dealt with her grief privately, refusing to allow it to interfere with her mission. She had never stormed out of an important meeting with rebel leaders like a child, angry and hurting. 

But he is Shiro’s right hand, not anyone else’s. Allura looks at him and sees another Galra paladin, tolerates his connection with the Blades but doesn’t encourage it the way Shiro did. He is not, in fact, entirely sure that they’re friends. In the midst of his despair, he is not entirely sure that he’s friends with any of them. 

He clings to that, his mouth firming, shoulders tensed for an argument. The Red Lion rumbles softly in her hangar, eager for a fight. She doesn’t really understand despair, as many times as he’s tried to explain it to her in terms she might understand. Pack broken, mates separated, pilots kept away from lions, pilots dying. Isolated, lonely. Her response is always the same: fight back. Take back. 

“We will have to leave this area soon,” Allura announces, her gaze steady on him. “Shiro is not here, and we cannot afford to still be here when the Galra fleets regroup. _We_ need time to regroup, and decide on a plan of action. We cannot fight like this.”

Retreat, she’s saying. Red doesn’t want to, the way Red never wants to retreat, and her stubbornness lodges in Keith’s lungs, caught between her nature and how fucking tired he feels. He has the phantom sensation all the time that her cables are still embedded in his skin, drinking him down to nothing, that if he moved a certain way or looked in a mirror he would find the umbilical cables attached to his spine, strung through the depths of the hallways and corridors all the way back to the hangar. Her other pilot let her drink, she whispers, and sends him an image of a figure with familiar silver hair, bare to the waist, a forest of glowing wires sprouting from his back as he puttered around the hangar and hummed over pieces of equipment. 

_Fight,_ she whispers. His fists clench, struggling with her. Shiro used to help him with this. Shiro and Black helped him with this, reining in Red’s enthusiasm, keeping her from clashing too much with Blue, her polar opposite. Lance is even sitting nearest to Allura, the nerves plain on his face, obviously, obviously willing to stand up next to her and support her because she’s going against Keith, and that’s just fucking typical of everyone, dragging at him, holding him back--

“Keith.”

He swings his head, stung by the command in Allura’s voice, and realizes he’d been staring at Lance with his lips pulled back from his teeth, growling faintly. Lance is halfway standing himself, a strange look on his face, Hunk’s fist buried in his jacket. 

“Look at me,” Allura orders. “Don’t look at him. You know who I am.”

Red does. Red recognizes The Princess, and Keith can feel her receding from his veins, relinquishing his body back to him inch by inch. A fog lifts from his vision. He shakes his head like a dog, and sees Lance put a hand to his temple, letting Hunk draw him back down to the couch protectively. 

Blue and Yellow together, he thinks, and chases the thought away. They’re not their lions. Allura is right that they can’t fight like this, no matter what the lions want. They’re all unbalanced and reeling. He is reeling. He’s not in control of himself.

“I’m so sorry, Keith,” she says more gently, and he realizes he’d ducked his head to her as well, hiding his eyes. 

Kolivan rests a hand on his shoulder and tells him matter-of-factly that he should not have imprinted so young on a mate, as he will carry the scars on his heart for the rest of his life. Galra, he says, form deep attachments, and it is sometimes better to deny those instincts than let them destroy one from the inside. He asks very seriously if Keith has thought about following Shiro into oblivion, and if he would prefer to be isolated and guarded for his own safety until the impulses pass. There is an implication that this is a standard process for the Blades, and not for the first time Keith thinks of Ulaz and Thace, sacrificing themselves like it was easy. Like it was something, maybe, that they’d been waiting for. 

Antok had not come back from the fight against Haggar. Kolivan had given no outward indication of grief, no change in his serious, grim demeanor, but two other anonymous, masked Blades had appeared in his shadow, even apparently sharing his quarters, and now Keith understands why. 

The denial on the tip of his tongue dies, unspoken. He and Shiro weren’t _mates._ He’d been a dumb fucking kid at Garrison, unable to comprehend his own feelings, and it was only after Shiro had been shot into space that he realized all of that _comfort_ and _safety_ had not simply been a very intense friendship, in his limited experience with friendships. He wanted Shiro any way he could have him. He wanted Shiro on his back and he wanted to get on his knees and he wanted them to fall asleep together and he wanted to watch Shiro drink coffee in the mornings and he wanted to run his hands through his hair and he wanted Shiro to always, always make time to wish him luck on his exams and to tell him that he was worth something. He wanted to never be lonely again, after Shiro had wormed his way underneath Keith’s hard, bitter armor. Shiro liked him and he didn’t know why. Nobody else did. 

Most of Shiro’s year-mates snickered tolerantly over the feral kitten he’d somehow adopted but wrote Keith off as a project, as Shiro trying to encourage underprivileged youth or whatever, and couldn’t fathom that Keith and Shiro were friends, that Shiro had become his only friend despite Keith’s best efforts otherwise. 

Keith’s roommates told ugly jokes behind their hands. Keith’s teachers were pleased to see him spending time with a positive role model. Keith’s classmates were envious and resentful and admiring and ingratiating, all equally unbearable, and Keith wanted all of them to go away, desperately. 

Shiro never made him feel like the silences between them needed to be filled up with empty words. Shiro was patient with him, and didn’t ask the questions that Keith always dreaded in strangers, and never took the shitty things that Keith said personally. He’d said, rather unbelievably, that he’d had a difficult time making friends, too. He said he had a hard time just being Shiro, sometimes, rather than the person that other people expected at any given moment. 

“What do you mean?” Keith had asked, even though he knew exactly what Shiro meant. Keith was someone different to everyone who looked at him. 

Shiro had smiled a sort of lopsided smile, looking across the room at nothing. “It’s funny, isn’t it,” he said, “that the mantra, the moral of the story is always ‘be yourself,’ and all it does is make you want to ask ‘which one?’” 

 

 

 

the star student. Shiro the dutiful son. Shiro the approachable upperclassman. Shiro the cool-headed pilot, who also had to be daring and adaptable but not too unconventional, who had to mediate the resentment of his own classmates who couldn’t match his scores, who had to be humble but not too humble, and couldn’t look twice at someone without getting their phone number written on a napkin and slipped into his pocket, even if all he’d asked for was to pass the ketchup in the mess hall. 

Everyone wanted something from Shiro. Keith had been determined to give, if he could, which meant not asking for things he didn’t deserve. Shiro had come back to them scarred and traumatized and doubting his own humanity, so when Keith crawled into his bed that first night in the desert, the way he’d been too afraid to before Kerberos, it was only to sleep. To hold onto him. Shiro tossed and turned in his nightmares and sometimes woke up in cold sweats, biting back shouts, and sometimes he slipped out of bed apologetically and went to run or train or sit in Black’s cockpit, but sometimes he slept better with another body tucked against his, reminding him physically that he wasn’t alone. He made himself small when he slept, letting Keith wrap himself around him, and Keith stroked his hair and quietly wanted to murder everyone who had ever laid a hand on him.

He doesn’t think feeling that way about Shiro is a particularly alien trait, but what does he know about emotions. He bites his lip, anxious in front of Kolivan in a way he doesn’t feel around anyone else. Kolivan knows about his heritage, and more about his own body than Keith does. He has not been comforting, precisely, but he has made it clear that Keith is a member of the Blades and that they have duties to him. They allow him to join their silent training sessions. They answer his halting questions about his mother’s culture, when he can bring himself to ask. None of it feels familiar. None of it is comforting. Shiro is the one who had 

“We weren’t,” is all he says, finally. 

 

Keith doesn’t have to search for an answer to give Kolivan, though. He feels that tug again, that faint wash of sensation over his skin, and knows reflexively that Lance is on the other side of the door at the far end of the room, hesitating. Lance is looking for him, and waiting for him to finish his conversation with Kolivan. Something in his expression must change, because the huge alien glances thoughtfully in that direction.

“Ten thousand years ago,” he says slowly, “the Emperor was said to have been poisoned by a slow, wasting corruption. He would have died, but the bond between himself and the Paladins of Voltron kept his heart safe until he let himself be severed from them.” 

The door whooshes open. Lance pretends to be surprised to find them, as if he hadn’t known perfectly well where Keith was. Lance has been doing this ever since the battle. They all have. Nobody is left alone for longer than an hour, no matter what, not because of any conscious decision or impulse to babysit but because they can’t stand to be by themselves, even in their own rooms. They’re contracting, closing in on the gap in their ranks. Hunk has been sleeping in the common area. Pidge has established a workspace in a corner, even though all of her big equipment is in Green’s hangar or in the room she converted into a lab. Lance doesn’t even have the excuse of needing Keith for something, or asking a question, he just stands there in the doorway radiating discomfort until Keith comes to him

No one has talked about Shiro being dead, or holding a funeral, which is a small mercy after the incessant gossip in the hallways of Garrison. Keith can’t even feel oppressed by the way the others hover, somehow, because he knows that Shiro’s shadow is weighing just as heavily on them. They all catch themselves saying Shiro’s name, pausing that half second in conversations where his voice should have been. 

“We just got him back, you know,” Lance says, mumbling, arms wrapped around his knees on the couch. “It’s not fair. Like-- why is it always him?” 

It’s a nonsensical statement, because all of them have taken their turns in the healing pods, and all of them have gone missing during missions. The hot, burning stone in Keith’s belly gets worse, and Hunk’s shoulders are trembling where he’s buried in his mound of blankets. Allura and Pidge, working on converting the data from the battle from Altean to English, sit shoulder to shoulder, and Allura’s fingers twist in her lap. 

She doesn’t say it out loud, but she doesn’t have to. She and Coran have already given the speech a million times over, back when they were still training and the whole concept seemed more absurd and abstract: the Black Paladin is not just responsible for leading Voltron, but for forming intense connections with each of the other Paladins. The natures of their quintessence push and pull at each other, some in harmony and some in balanced conflict, but the Black Paladin had to bring them together. 

It brings the team together when everyone is just a little bit in love with their leader, Keith thinks darkly, and shoves his shoulder more firmly against Lance’s to avoid Allura looking at him not looking at her. He wants to get up and go flying, he wants the blood warm current of quintessence against his bare skin and the deep bite of the cables. He wants to go to Black’s hangar and demand answers. He wants to fight something. He wants to curl into a ball and sleep and not wake up until Shiro was back with them and everything was better and he didn’t have to feel this way any more. 

He gets up and goes to the training room, exhausting himself. It’s been a week since they left the area they last saw Shiro alive, and they are still regrouping, or whatever Allura wants to call it. Bleeding out, more like. Keith has nightmares of dying in space, explosions in vacuum and running out of oxygen in a cold, frozen, metal trap. He has nightmares of the bombing mission and this time it’s not Thace, it’s Shiro with the wound in his side, telling him to go on ahead, telling him how important he is to Voltron. Pidge is red-eyed and snappish and Hunk is nowhere to be seen, and Keith and Lance get into a stupid shouting match in the training room that goes so far as to wake the lions, Red and Blue both snarling in their heads from their separate hangars. Hunk sits between them at the table, not shrinking from their hostility for once but grimly enduring, putting food on both their plates and ordering them both to finish it because he knows exactly when both of them last ate. Keith chokes down as much as he can before he starts to feel nauseated. He shoves up from the table and doesn’t make it to the nearest refresher. Lance appears to help him clean it up without a word, looking surly and green around the gills himself. 

They’re not ready for another mission, but the universe doesn’t care about that. They’re sent out to fight. There are planets to liberate and Zarkon’s absence from the battlefield is an advantage they can’t afford to waste. The Empire seems to be reeling, and rumors fly thick and fast. Their allies want Voltron, want the paladins, want the lions. Allura brings them through wormhole after wormhole, pressing their advantage in mobility, showing up nearly on top of Galra cruisers and launching the lions before the first alarms can sound. Keith is first out of the hangar, launching before he’s even properly cabled in, and flies as recklessly as he dares, trying to fuck up, trying to destroy as many Galra ships as he can, thinking of paper cranes. If he shoots down a thousand, if he shoots down a hundred thousand, maybe it will bring Shiro back to him. He roars and Red roars with him, augmenting him, her eagerness channeled into his veins. He feels her like a fever under his skin. 

He doesn’t fuck up. The others yell at him over the comms but they’re in sync with him in a way he should’ve been amazed by, everyone in the right places at the right times, Pidge off his left flank and Lance off his right, letting him be their spearhead, Hunk covering their six like they’ve flown in this formation their entire lives. Shiro gave them this, he thinks, and is abruptly blinded by tears. He yanks his helmet off so the others won’t hear his wet, ragged breathing. The quintessence filling the cockpit tastes like blood, a copper tang at the very back of his throat. The formation changes around him in an instant, putting Red in the protected center, and he wants to yell at them for it, for shifting their focus from attack to defense. The swarms of Galra fighters recognize the change and part to allow the cruisers to open fire.

 _Keith,_ he hears Shiro say, gentle, imaginary, and he exhales a sob, a cloud of bubbles mushrooming up in the liquid surrounding him. Shiro’s blood runs through Black’s veins, and it was possible that just the tiniest, tiniest amount might have been circulated into Keith when he cabled in. He knows it’s just his own grasping, pathetic imagination to think so, but it’s enough to make his fingers tighten on the controls, picturing himself reining Red in, holding her mouth like she wore a bridle, bringing her back to his hands when all she wanted to do was charge forward. 

The Castle ship looms overhead, as slow and ponderous as an old wooden warship compared to the impossible maneuverability of the lions, but devastating in a broadside, covering them with a hail of laser fire. The cruisers start to break formation, and he sees the opening. He feels Red quivering beneath him, ready to launch forward. Her cables hum, pulling from him, draining him, and he doesn’t feel tired, but he remembers the time limit that Shiro imposed on all their battles. They’ve already gone over, the synchronized timer blinking accusingly from the console, and no one had said anything. 

His fingers flick over the console, pulling up an audio only channel. “Guys,” he says, and it is shocking how thin his voice sounds. “I need-- I need to to pull back. Red is--”

Except he can’t just blame this on Red, when he’d been doing just fine with her before. This is him, out of balance and throwing everything off. 

“Go,” Pidge says tightly, bringing Green around to cover his new trajectory. The smallest out of all of them, her battle timer is only slightly longer than Keith’s for how much blood she’s able to give to power her lion, even though Green isn’t a greedy drinker like Red. If Keith is over-limit, so is Pidge, and if any of them faint in the cockpit the lions will revert to their instincts, which typically never involved sticking to a plan or listening to other pilots. Only Shiro and Black had been able to roar down Red in the past, when Keith had passed out at the controls during training and Red had refused to stop fighting. “We’ll be right behind you.” 

Red resists his grip on the controls, tossing her head angrily and lashing her tail as he tries to point her towards the Castle. Without Black’s authority to bolster a retreat order, she doesn’t want to believe that Keith has hit his limit, trying to coax him to give her more, to let her fight, let her win. She wants those cruisers. She wants to see them explode in a string of lights and blossoming flames, revelling in the way it satisfies him. He grits his teeth and threatens silently to eject, to let the cables tear loose and to expel the cockpit full of quintessence out into space, wasting it and his blood. 

He can feel the others behind him, anxiety spiking all through the lion bond at how sluggishly Red is moving. He can tell that they can tell that Red is fighting him, and without being connected as Voltron they can’t bend all of their wills 

Red yowls at him, highly offended and still fighting, until a familiar roar makes them both freeze.

The Black Lion is flying towards them, her great mouth agape, firing at their pursuers to give all of them a clear path of retreat. A squad of snubfighters that were harrying their flanks fly right into the path of the lasers and disintegrate into fire and metal. Stunned, Keith lets his grip loosen on the controls and drops into the lion bond, searching for that familiar feeling of safety and steadiness, Shiro’s presence in the back of all of their heads.

It’s not there. He can feel Black, but muted somehow, distant, and he can feel all of the others, right down to Pidge’s exhaustion as she clings to consciousness, Lance supporting her with Blue, but Shiro isn’t there. 

The comm is riot with yelling. He feels himself slipping, feels Red’s renewed interest in turning around and fighting, now that Black is on the field, but then Hunk and Yellow are there, grabbing Red by the back of the neck like a mother cat scruffing a wayward kitten and jetting forward towards the castle. Red squalls at the indignity but doesn’t struggle, miraculously, and unconsciousness rears up to swallow him.

He wakes at the feeling of something cold and wet splashing down onto his cheek, like a raindrop. He flinches reflexively, and tries to move to wipe it away. His limbs are sluggish and heavy, and he realizes as he pries his eyes open that he’s still inside Red’s cockpit, emergency lights on and the quintessence only partially drained, leaving about two feet of liquid on the floor, and he is still cabled in, slumped over in the pilot’s chair. He coughs, his lungs protesting the switch from oxygenated quintessence to regular air. He is cold and wet and weak. The leftover quintessence pooled around his legs is red-tinged, moreso than usual, and he can see where slow droplets of blood from his abused ports have trickled down his arms and legs.

This is the kind of bullshit Shiro didn’t let him do. This is why they have the timers. He groans, scrabbling to reach the buttons on the console that will eject the cables and drain the rest of the cockpit. Despite all the blood she’d feasted on, Red is tired from the battle and dormant, just a faint rumble of breathing in the back of his head like a great beast fast asleep.

“Let me _out,_ you dumb cat,” he pants, pulling against the cables that suddenly seem to weigh a thousand pounds when Red isn’t awake. He strains, and suddenly a cable pops free with a sharp

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	6. Castle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith, Lance, and Shiro get captured.

They were marched at gunpoint through the hallways of the Galra ship, bruised and bloodied and maybe a little disbelieving, still; Lance was still yelling insults and making faces, balking every few steps and then stumbling forward as rough hands shoved him on. Keith felt numb and far away from himself, detached from the reality of his bound hands and the blood matting his hair. It didn’t feel real. It didn’t seem possible that they could’ve been defeated, captured, _taken_ so easily. He had the Red Lion’s fury still simmering beneath his skin, waiting to explode, and in his mind he imagined that it wouldn’t make any difference how many guns were on them, how many armored guards and drones; he was fast, he would be _faster,_ he would cut them down like weeds--

But the tall, hulking guards next to him were dragging Shiro like a sack of dirt, his limp body dangling helplessly between them and his legs trailing along the hallway floor, and every time Keith looked over a cold storm of fear welled up instead of him, squeezing his lungs, drowning out the rage. It settled in his limbs like cement, weighing him down. He couldn’t fight. If he fought, they’d put a gun to Shiro’s unprotected temple or a blade to his soft, vulnerable throat. 

There was blood trickling down the side of Keith’s face, running into his eye. It was annoying, and he shook his head like a dog to clear his vision, trying his best to pull closer to Shiro, to see if he was injured anywhere, bristling every time the indifferent guards seemed like they might drop him. He knew he should be memorizing the number of turns in the hallway, counting how many steps it had taken them to come from the hangar where they’d been pulled down from their lions. He should be looking for places where the guards gathered. The lights overhead seemed very bright, and he couldn’t keep track of the numbers he was trying to compile in his head. Every time Shiro’s head lolled Keith thought perhaps his eyes were fluttering open finally, that he was waking up, every time a shadow crossed his armor it looked like a darker stain of blood that Keith had missed and his heart jumped painfully. Red growled and snapped in his head, fighting past the static that was interfering with their mental link, alarmed and confused by his distress. She was restrained herself, somewhere, but she wanted him to get loose and come to her, she wanted him to give into the whitehot fury that came with being the guardian spirit of fire and lash out, burn his enemies to cinders, melt the floor and walls around him, but his fear for Shiro kept scattering his concentration like gusts of wind blowing out a pilot light. He could hear himself breathing too fast. Shiro’s mouth was slack, the downsweep of his lashes against his cheeks delicate and fragile, the metal prosthetic dangling limply. All Keith could picture when he tried to think of attacking, escaping, was a swirling maelstrom of fire and Shiro in the middle of it, unconscious while the flames licked hungrily at his skin. 

“Move,” the guard hissed behind him, and Keith obeyed numbly.

They were taken to a wide-mouthed cell in the middle of a stretch of empty wall and unceremoniously shoved inside, Keith and Lance stumbling together, balance thrown as their energy chains were turned off. The metal cuffs on their forearms remained as a reminder that they could be restrained at any time. 

Keith whirled immediately to catch Shiro, pain blossoming all the way up to his shoulder as he jolted his bad arm. He gritted his teeth and refused to let his knees buckle, holding Shiro up through sheer stubbornness. Their armor scraped together. 

Lance, meanwhile, had his face shoved right up against the energy bars of the cell as their guards tromped off down the hallway, indifferent to the insults he was yelling at their backs. 

“That’s right, you’d better run, you mangy purple cowards!” he shouted, sticking a skinny arm through the bars and waving his fist. “Don’t want none of this, do ya?! You know what would happen! I’d kick your furry asses!”

“Lance, shut up,” Keith hissed at him, struggling with Shiro’s deadweight draped all over his shoulders. Keith didn’t know what Zarkon had done to him, Zarkon had just _looked_ at Shiro and somehow his eyes had rolled back and his knees buckled, dropping him to the floor right then and there, and Keith had never had it driven home so clearly that he wasn’t strong enough to manhandle an unconscious adult body. He couldn’t carry Shiro. He couldn’t run with him. When they’d escaped the Garrison Shiro had still been semi-conscious, holding up his own weight while Keith and Lance guided his steps, and Hunk had helped lift him on the landspeeder that Keith had deliberately parked almost on top of the entranceway.

If they had a chance to escape right then and there, Keith knew he wouldn’t be able to bring Shiro with them. 

It was probably why the chains had been deactivated. Keith’s right wrist was a throbbing mass of pain, either broken or fractured, and there wasn’t a single part of him that didn’t feel beaten to a pulp. He had the sinking feeling the guards knew that even if they’d left the cell door wide fucking open, neither he nor Lance was going anywhere.

Lance wasn’t paying attention to him. Lance was still squawking down the hallway, now in Spanish, while Keith’s thighs were trembling and burning and what the fuck was wrong with him, couldn’t he fucking see that Keith was about to drop Shiro. 

“ _Lance,_ ” he snarled again, louder, “shut the fuck up and get over here.” It was easier to be mad at Lance than it was to think about leaving Shiro behind in an escape attempt. 

“Don’t fucking snap at me,” Lance flared, still standing uselessly at the bars as Keith’s strength gave out and he went to hands (hand) and knees, spilling Shiro off his back. “Oh my god, Keith, don’t drop him!”

Keith was going to kill him. Keith was going to destroy him, just as soon as he could breathe again, just as soon as his muscles stopped trembling. 

Lance managed to get Shiro turned over, carefully pillowing his head and shoulders on his knees, looking down at him in concern. Unlike the two of them there was no blood, no bruising, no battered armor. Shiro looked pristine, maybe a little pale, his entire face composed and still. He could’ve been asleep, except Keith knew that wasn’t how Shiro looked when he slept.

“He just looks asleep,” Lance said, bewildered, and Keith wanted to strangle him all over again. “I think he’s breathing fine. Why won’t he--”

“Why are you asking me?” Keith snapped, crawling over to them himself and hunting for Shiro’s pulse. Strong and regular, and his chest rose and fell easily. His lips were faintly parted, his muscles totally slack. His head lolled to the side in Lance’s lap, vulnerable. 

_Dreaming,_ came the stray thought, and Keith frowned. There was no movement under Shiro’s closed lids, no limb twitches or faint expressions to indicate that was the case. He looked calm and peaceful. 

Lance was sputtering. Lance was flushed red, even with his dark skin and the mottled bruising swelling up under it, but Keith didn’t have time for his shit. “His skin’s cool. We need to find something to keep him warm.” He pushed himself up to his feet (a harder effort than it should have been) and went to look around their cell, cradling his bad hand to his chest.

Faint lights flickered to life with the movement; the cell was actually much bigger than Keith had originally thought. There were small colored partitions of energy scattered about, giving the impression of divided spaces or rooms, but they weren’t solid and Keith’s wary hand passed right through one. An illusion of privacy without giving the occupants anything to use or destroy, or even any actual privacy. The walls were a glossy black finish with tiny colored lines of energy racing over them in patterns that never seemed to repeat. A sizeable shower area was in the back, the floor there slightly warmer, with hot and cold running water that jetted out from smooth half moon depressions in the walls, and there was an adjacent space with a gigantic curved basin in the floor that might’ve been the Galra version of a hot tub. There were handsome, minimalist bathroom facilities, what seemed to be a floor to ceiling wall-window looking out into space-- except Keith found a backlit console that changed the picture on every single surface, even the floor, so it was just a projection. He didn’t think they were anywhere close to the exterior of the ship. Unnerved by the sight of _space_ underneath his feet (and ignoring Lance’s squawk of alarm), he quickly switched it back to the default. 

He found what he was looking for in a cleverly hidden storage closet in the wall: full of soft, plush blankets and objects that resembled nothing so much as giant squishy beanbags. Nothing hard or sharp, but that was to be expected. The energy partitions delineated three generous spaces for sleeping, large rectangles of the bare floor made of some spongy, comfortable material in lieu of any furniture.

It wasn’t much different from the multi-bedroom family quarters found on the castle ship, if he had to be honest, although Alteans believed in furniture built up off the floor instead of all this sunken, recessed stuff. There was even a “room” in the back that might’ve been a training area, the floor and walls covered in something that felt like a kind of firm foam. They would be comfortable here. 

Keith didn’t like it. This wasn’t the kind of barren hellhole you tossed your enemies in to break their spirits, and it didn’t sound like what Shiro had haltingly described of the cells he’d been kept in as a slave. If it weren’t for the glowing energy bars covering the open “wall” that led out into the corridor, Keith could have been convinced that these were very basic guest apartments. 

Lance said the same thing, wandering around aimlessly after he and Keith had painstakingly gotten Shiro established on the nearest sunken bed. Keith needed to keep his hands busy so he didn’t have to think about how they were shaking, how much his wrist hurt, so he occupied himself arranging bedding and carefully removing Shiro’s armor in the faint hope that it would make him more comfortable. It had been three hours since they’d last seen any guards. There was no matching cell across the hall from them, just a massive, glittering Galra emblem carved into the far wall like a decoration, and there didn’t seem to be cells on either side of them. They could hear the steady thrum of the ship’s engines but no voices, no footsteps. Whatever part of the ship this was, they were alone and isolated. 

“Swankiest prison I’ve ever seen.” Lance was holding a cold compress on his impressively blackened eye and moving gingerly; their bruises were starting to stiffen up now that the adrenaline had worn off. Keith spitefully wanted to ask him how many prisons he’d been in before. Instead he folded a blanket down into smaller and smaller sections, controlling his breathing. He knew that Lance talked when he got scared and used humor to cope with stress, no matter how ill-timed. Lance needed that constant ping and ping-back response from everyone around him. He paced back and forth and ran his mouth nervously and had nervous gestures, too much energy spilling off. 

Keith was the opposite. Keith got quiet and tense and withdrawn when he was under stress, coiling himself tighter and tighter until he exploded. All the things he wanted to yell started to bottle up inside him, compressing into a hot, livid coal in his belly and burning up his words.

It was in his psych file, that silence. It was something all of his instructors had tried to talk to him about, his inability to communicate and his simmering temper when everything around him started turning into obstacles. 

All of his instructors except Shiro. 

 

 

 

“Okay, so.” Lance cautiously arranged himself into a cross-legged pose on the other side of Shiro, apparently not picking up on Keith’s unsubtle silence or the fact that he kept his head down, concentrating on his task. “How are we busting out of here?”

He said it eagerly, leaning in like he honestly fucking believed that Keith had a plan ready to go, like the cell wasn’t rigged with cameras or microphones or god knew what kind of monitoring technology. Like Keith wasn’t nursing a broken bone, his sword-hand useless. Like this was a game. Like this was a-- training session back on the castle ship, Allura and Shiro watching them, waiting for them to figure it out.

Keith stared at him.

“Cos I was thinking, we should get the lions to split up, one of them attacks the ship for a distraction, the other one flies over here and rips the wall out, these morons didn’t even tie us up or anything-- why are you looking at me like that?”

“Summon your bayard.” Keith heard himself from a distance, he sounded cold and furious. 

Lance leaned a little away from him, still not getting it. “I can’t, man, I’m not-- my head’s still pounding, every time I try it slips away from me. But if we really, really need them, we’ll be able to call them, right? I pulled out mine when I was like, falling down unconscious that one time.”

“I can’t summon mine. I can’t call Red, either.” There was a horrible blank, staticky place where Red’s presence in his head usually was, and there was something else there, something dark and huge and cold. 

Lance’s expression faltered for the first time. “--oh. I thought… I thought maybe it was just me, from the knock on the head…”

If Shiro were awake, he would say something reassuring to the slow dawning uncertainty on Lance’s stupid face. He would say something calming, he would lay out their options, he would tell them not to focus on negatives like fear and doubt. He would say all the right things.

Shiro wasn’t awake and Keith didn’t know the right words. He said nothing as Lance stared back at him, all that eager optimism draining away like water through a sieve.

“We can’t carry Shiro,” Lance said finally, like it was just now dawning on him. His fingers had crept to the edge of the blankets, tangling in them. 

“Can you call Blue?” Keith pressed grimly, wanting to drive it home. Wanting to see it hurt.

Lance’s eyes unfocused for a second. “There’s… something in the way.” His voice was much, much quieter.

“It’s Zarkon.” He pretended he hadn’t seen Lance flinch. “Or Black, under Zarkon’s control. You saw what happened, Zarkon made Black eject Shiro. He’s done something to the lions. They’re listening to him, not us.”

“Blue would never--”

“Then why isn’t she answering you? Why isn’t she coming to get us right now? She’s bigger than Red, she could tear her way out of whatever hangar she’s in if she wanted to.”

Lance didn’t have an answer for him. Keith looked down at Shiro’s calm, still face, trying to control his breathing. He wanted to scream. He wanted to hit something, he wanted to fight, he wanted to punch something soft until it broke under his hands, but the only thing in here with him was Lance, who was looking more small and scared than Keith had ever seen him. 

Stupid kid, he thought, bitter and uncharitable. Stupid trainee kid cargo pilot. Keith wasn’t a soldier by any stretch himself, but he’d lived out in the desert alone, he’d gone up into the mountains alone. He knew how to rely on himself. He knew how to look at a dangerous situation and accept the facts. 

“We can’t carry Shiro,” he repeated. 

Lance’s fingers clenched into fists. “So what, you’re just gonna give up? We should just sit here and wait for whatever happens?” 

“If you’ve got any better ideas, I am all ears right now.”

“We could--” Lance’s eyes darted around their comfortable, decorative prison. “We could drag him, maybe on the blankets, maybe we could rig a sling--”

“Yeah?” Keith spat. “You think they’re going to let us sit here and fuck around with getting Shiro into a sling that we can carry? You think they’re not _watching?_ ”

“We’ll figure out where the cameras are! We’ll do it where they can’t see!”

“And how are we gonna get out? Are we gonna jump the guards when they bring us food? Are we gonna pretend to be sick, like in the movies, so they come in and check on us? Are you going to shoot your way out with your bayard that you can’t summon, and also help drag Shiro at a fucking snail’s pace through the halls filled with more guards? Are we gonna make a run for the escape pods that we don’t know where they are, or the lions that we don’t know where they are or if they’ll obey us if we get there?” 

“We’ll… we’ll…” Lance’s breath had sped up. His shoulders had hunched, clearly feeling attacked. 

“We’ll _what,_ Lance?!” Keith yelled, and Lance yelled right back at him.

“I don’t know, okay, I don’t know! What the fuck is wrong with you?! I’m trying to help here!”

“You’re not helping! Nothing you do ever helps, you don’t know anything!” Keith was on his feet somehow, he had his good hand in the fabric of Lance’s basesuit, and Lance was three inches away from his face, furious and scared and yelling right back.

“Shut up! Get _off_ me!” 

Lance shoved him back as hard as he could and that was all Keith needed to leap at him, knocking him to the floor. Lance scrabbled at him uselessly, flailing and bucking, getting a fistful of hair and yanking hard. He wasn’t even trying to hit him. Keith snarled and punched him clumsily with his off hand, splitting Lance’s lip back open. The coppery tang of blood rose in the air. He thought, for a second, that he could feel Red in his mind, interest caught by the sparks of violence, for a second he could see the hangar, he could feel some kind of impossibly huge restraint device holding his head and shoulders, a muzzle trapping his jaws, he could feel Red’s simmering fury and lashing tail, he wanted out, he wanted _out--_

The Blue Lion raised her great head and growled at him. His partner, his opposite, his counterpart.

Keith shoved himself away from Lance like he’d been burned. 

“I’m sorry,” he gasped, breath rattling in and out of his lungs. HIs head hurt. His skull rang with echoes. “I didn’t mean--”

“You did.” Lance pushed himself up to a sitting position, his knees still drawn up, protecting his core. For the first time he looked guarded and hostile, something closed off in his face. He looked, for once, like the other students at Garrison that had already made their decision to exclude Keith before ever speaking to him, sizing him up from his reputation or his looks or his background. There was blood smeared on his mouth again. “You meant it.” 

Keith didn’t try to deny it. Instead he forced himself to say, “My wrist is broken. Sword hand. I can’t fight.” He shuddered away from the memory of Zarkon, calmly catching his attack, stopping Keith’s descending sword like it was a feather, wrist held in an impossibly strong grip. Zarkon had barely flexed his fingers and Keith felt pain go all the way up his arm, his bayard falling into nothing. 

“You just punched me in the face.” Incredulous.

“I’m _sorry._ ” Keith sucked in a breath. “I need to… we have to, ‘in all scenarios of stress or danger--’”

“Oh my _god,_ don’t you dare quote the handbook at me.” 

“It’s what Shiro would say.” Keith stared down at his throbbing wrist, resting uselessly between his knees. “If he were awake.”

Uncomfortable silence descended. Then Lance shifted, pushing himself painfully to his feet. “I’m gonna get something for your wrist, okay.” 

“A sling?”

“Fuck you.”

It was a sling, rigged with surprising professionalism from bits and ends Lance found around the chambers. Keith didn’t ask him about it. They weren’t talking now except for short, one word necessities, not out of temper but tiredness, aching and exhausted. 

The day had passed by and no one had come. No guards, no Zarkon, no food, although there was water from the taps. Shiro was still exactly as they’d left him, without even a twitch of movement. 

They filled the huge sunken bathtub with water as hot as they could stand it, prodding each other to keep moving. Keith had to let Lance help him get his armor and basesuit off and they sloshed in together, neither wanting to wait. The tub would’ve fit the entire team. The Galra didn’t believe in soap bars but there were strange little jelly globes of different colors that dissolved in the water and turned it sudsy, and they washed off the blood and soaked their bruises. They would still be barely able to move the next day, Keith could knew. The stiffness would set in. Lance’s skin grew flushed in the heat and he looked uncomfortable, but he didn’t ask why Keith was forcing himself to stay in the water, and he didn’t make a move to get out until Keith did. 

Keith cradled his wrist carefully, trying not to jar it as he shrugged into one of the robes. He wanted to stay in his armor

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End file.
